It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

So many of my book recommendations have been from the weekly shares on teachmentortexts.com. Thank you to Jen and Kellee for hosting and thank you to all who contribute their reading lists! To see what others are reading, head on over to the website and link into all of the reading recommendations.

Over the weekend, I was preparing for our district's professional development day tomorrow. Since I will be facilitating the new Opinion Unit for our second-grade teachers, my eight-year old nephew and I read several books and worked on finding places where we could make evidence-based statements. We had fun! These books are not new books for me, but the thinking and pushing for evidence with a second-grader was new to me.

We read Harriet, My Darling Child, You'll Drive Me Wild by Mem Fox to debate whether Harriet's mother over-reacted. (Jack didn't think so, but I did!) If you missed Harriet when she was first published, I highly recommend this book for teaching focus and for encouraging debate.


We also read Poppleton in Winter by Cynthia Rylant and debated whether Cherry Sue was self-serving or a good friend. Who knew there would be so much text evidence to support either theory??? We also created a chart of supporting and refuting text evidence for the statement that Poppleton was a creative pig.

I went through some of the other books that we use as mentor texts to develop more statements that could lend themselves to opinion writing. Here's a chart that I am working on:

Book	Statement to Debate
When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry by Molly Bang	Sophie dealt with her anger responsibly
The Chalk Doll by Charlotte Pomerantz	The mother had an unhappier childhood than the daughter.
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein	The boy was a good enough friend to the tree.
Koala Lou by Mem Fox	Koala Lou should not have participated in the olympics.

I'm looking forward to continuing this thinking with our teachers tomorrow and if anyone has more to contribute, by all means! Happy reading!