It's Monday! What are You Reading?

Jen Vincent and Kellee Moye cohost It's Monday! What Are You Reading weekly on their blogs.   To see what others are reading and recommending each Monday, or to participate, be sure to check out their blogs Teach Mentor Texts and Unleashing Readers. 

Carnivores, written by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Dan Santat, is a hysterical and laugh-out-loud kind of book! One of my colleagues recommended it to me because she knew I would thoroughly enjoy it, especially since I am a vegetarian! I read it aloud to my class last week and they loved it! In this book, the carnivores are expressing how their feelings are hurt because of the reputation they have for eating other animals so they decide they are going to attempt to become vegetarians.  Needless to say, their attempt is not very successful and they end up realizing that just because they eat meat doesn't mean they are bad, it is just what they do! This book will have you and your students laughing hysterically while reading it.  My students immediately said this should be a series and should include a herbivores book too! Thank you Sandy for recommending this book! :)

I also just started reading two new professional books: 

The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching: A Checklist for Staying Focused Every Day by Bryan Goodwin and Elizabeth Ross Russell.  This is an ASCD book that was published this year that my principal shared with me - thank you Grace!  TCRWP has been talking about the power of checklists and how we can use them with students instead of only rubrics so I am excited to read more about checklists in this new professional book.   At the beginning of this book, it discusses how pilots and doctors use checklists all the time and how powerful they are in those fields and how they can also be powerful in education. Stay tuned to hear more about this book next Monday! 

I also just purchased Mindsets in the Classroom by Mary Cay Ricci. I loved reading Mindset by Carol Dweck and Opening Minds by Peter Johnston, along with many articles about growth mindset so I was excited to see this new professional book.  I have been teaching my students about growth mindset vs. fixed mindset for the past two years and can't wait to learn new strategies to build a growth mindset school culture from this book.  Stay tuned to hear more about this book next Monday! 

Enjoy reading this week! :)