It's Monday! What are You Reading?

Thank you Jen and Kellee for hosting this weekly!  To see what others are reading and recommending, or to participate, be sure to check out their blog Teach Mentor Texts :)

I was excited to find Gone Fishing: A Novel in Verse by Tamera Will Wissinger and Matthew Cordell because we are in the middle of our Poetry unit in writing workshop, I love finding novels written in verse to share with students, and I have a few students who are passionate about fishing too! I loved reading this book this weekend and can't wait to read it aloud to my class this week.  Each poem names the type of poem it is right under the title and the story is told so well through the poems.  In the back of the book is a great treasure for the reader: A Poet's Tackle box! This is a toolkit for poets to use as they write their own poems.  It includes descriptions of poetry techniques as well as detailed explanations of all the poetic forms that were used to write the poems in this novel.   Enjoy!

I read Someday by Eileen Spinelli years ago when it came out, but reread it last week with a different lens.  This time, I reread it using the lens of a mentor text for poetry.  I read it aloud to my class last week and had students pay attention to the repetition and the patterns Eileen Spinelli uses in the text.  I love how this book switches back and forth between future and present tense and how it clearly shows how we all dream of what we want our life to be like in the future.  I have some students who loved the pattern of "Someday... Right now... Someday... Today..." and are using it as a mentor text to write their own poems. 

One of my students bought a copy of I Funny by James Patterson for our class so I took it home to read this weekend before giving a book talk to the class and adding it to our "New Books" basket on Monday.  This book is hysterical and kids will laugh out loud while reading it! Students will enjoy laughing along with the main character, Jamie Grimm. Although Jamie has a great sense of humor and loves being a comedian, he is facing some challenges in life like being in a wheelchair and living with an aunt and uncle instead of his family. He is also getting bullied in middle school to top it all off, but uses his jokes to help that situation. This is a great book for middle grade students and will make them laugh, while teaching them important life lessons! 

Happy Reading! :)