It's Monday! What are You Reading?

Jen Vincent at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee Moye and Ricki Ginsburg at Unleashing Readers 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 head over to these blogs.

One Voice by Cindy McKinley is the sequel to One Smile. If you haven't read her first book, One Smile, it is about a little girl named Katie who smiles at a man, who is sitting on a bench, on the way to her bus.  Her smile inspires the man to smile at someone else and the pattern continues throughout the story until the smile circles back to Katie at the end  It is a great story of how one smile can pass onto someone else and make their day a little brighter.  
One Voice is another circle story about the concept of "pay it forward" and how one kind act can lead to another.  In this story, a young boy's act of kindness creates a chain reaction of kindness.  Each kind act inspires the person to do something kind for someone else until it circles back to the young boy, Jacob, at the end of the story.  This is another great story to read aloud to students to discuss the power of small acts of kindness whether it be a simple smile or a gesture.  

During our math units, we try to provide students with real life problems to practice math concepts to see how the skills apply to daily life.  This year, I have many students in my class who are sports fans so I wanted to try to find examples of word problems that revolved around sports.  During my search on Amazon, I discovered the Math Everywhere series by Katie Marsico . In this series, there are four books: Ball Game Math, Shopping Trip Math, Kitchen Math , and Math on the Move.  In each book, there are a variety of multi-step word problems that revolve around one category such as sports, shopping, baking/cooking.  There are answer keys in the back of each book that not only provide the answers, but also explain the steps taken to arrive at the solution. I envision using the problems in these books in a variety of ways: daily challenges, weekly challenges, problem of the day, group or partner problem-solving, etc.  I think it is so important for us to provide students with real life applications in math and this series definitely helps us do that! 

Happy Reading!