Wild Rose Reader

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Eyewitness Reports Charity Art Auction: Bid on Original Artwork by Three Blue Rose Girls and Other Children's Illustrators

Grace Lin, Anna Alter, and Meghan McCarthy of the Blue Rose Girls all have paintings up for sale this week in the Eyewitness Reports Auction. The profits from this fundraiser go entirely to support 826LA, a fabulous literacy organization. Bid on an original piece of art by a children's illustrator and support a great cause!

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Grace's Painting

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Anna's Painting

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Meghan's Painting

Click here to bid on their paintings and the artwork

of many other talented children's illustrators.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Going Back to School...with Poetry 2010

Messing Around on the Monkey Bars and Other School Poems for Two Voices
Written by Betsy Franco
Illustrated by Jessie Hartland
Candlewick, 2009

This collection of nineteen poems touches on many different aspects of a typical school day—including a “wild” bus ride, writing animal reports, library class, recess activities, looking through “weird” stuff in the lost and found, pencil tapping, lunch money, homework, and a new kid at school. The lively rhyming poems, written for two voices, would be perfect to use in a choral reading activity in an elementary classroom. Franco even provides suggestions for “adventurous ways to read the poems” in the back matter of the book.

Here are excerpts from a few poems to give you a taste of this school-themed collection.

From New Kid at School

Where did you come from?

Far away.

Miss your friends?

Every day.

Where do you live?

Maple Street.

What’s your name?

Call me Pete.

From Animal Reports

I might do mine on the great blue whale.
I’m thinking about the valley quail.

Or maybe I’ll try the spitting spider.
There’s always the yellow-bellied glider.

I might look up the lazy sloth.
My mom said, Do the luna moth.”

From Messing Around on the Monkey Bars

Time for recess!
Here we are,

messing around
on the monkey bars!

Hand over hand,
fast or slow,

calling to
our friends below.

Franco uses straightforward language to capture the essence of an elementary school day from the morning bus ride to the final bell in her lighthearted verse. Hartland’s humorous childlike gouache illustrations add to the fun of this collection that is sure to appeal to young children.

Click here to view an inside spread.

Click here to download a teacher’s guide.

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School Poems and Poetry Book Reviews from Wild Rose Reader

Things to Do If You Are a Stapler & Other Back-to-School Poems (August 2010)

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Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems compiled by Georgia Heard (April 2010)

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Stampede!: Poems to Celebrate the Wild Side of School by Laura Purdie Salas (September 2009)

Click here to check out Laura Salas’s Stampede! website.

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Countdown to Summer: A Poem for Every Day of the School Year by J. Patrick Lewis (August 2008)

Click here to look inside Countdown to Summer.

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Poetry Friday: Going Back to School...with Poetry (August 2007)

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Swimming Upstream: Middle School Poems by Kristine O’Connell George (August 2007)

Click here to look inside Swimming Upstream.

Click here for the Middle School Companion Guide for Swimming Upstream.

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Poetry Book Review from Blue Rose Girls

POETRY FRIDAY: This Is Just to Say. This post includes a review of Joyce Sidman’s book This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness (March 2007)

Click here for a reader’s guide for This Is Just to Say.

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At Blue Rose Girls, I have a lovely poem titled FIREFLIES by Marilyn Kallet--as well as lots of pictures of my summer vacation in Maine.

The Poetry Friday Roundup is at Book Aunt.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Here & There: August 26, 2010

Back to School

From Reading Rockets: Bright Ideas for Back-to-School Night … and Beyond (2010)

From Scholastic: Back-to-School Planning Guide

From Modern Family: Back to School Books

From The PlanetEsme Plan: MESSING AROUND ON THE MONKEY BARS (POETRY) and NEW BACK-TO-SCHOOL BOOKS (September 2009)

Other Issues

From NCTE
NCTE Executive Committee Cancels 2012 Phoenix Convention
The 2012 NCTE Annual Convention will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, November 14-19

On August 9, 2010, NCTE cancelled its Annual Convention that had been scheduled to be held November 14-19, 2012, in Phoenix, Arizona. The NCTE Executive Committee determined that Arizona law S.B. 1070 made it inadvisable to hold the meeting. Through the law, conditions have been created which would undercut NCTE’s core value commitment to diversity and
present a risk for many members who might be detained for an immigration check should they be stopped by police, with or without a warrant, during their stay in the city.

From Publishers Weekly
By John A. Sellers (8/18/2010)
Authors Withdraw from Teen Lit Festival

Excerpt:
Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook have been abuzz in the last 24 hours with news that four YA authors have pulled out of the annual Teen Lit Fest in Humble, Tex., a Houston suburb. The authors withdrew in support of writer Ellen Hopkins, who announced in a blog post last week that she had been disinvited from the festival, which is organized by the Humble Independent School District, and is scheduled for January 2011. In the post, entitled “Censorship Bites,” Hopkins announced that her invitation had been revoked after a middle-school librarian and parents approached a superintendent and the school board about her participation. Hopkins’s novels in verse deal with gritty subject matter: her Crank series, which concludes next month with Fallout, centers on meth addiction, while her 2009 novel, Tricks, was about teen prostitution. “We all feel badly that we’re making this stand,” Hopkins told School Library Journal. “We don’t want our readers to feel like we’re punishing them. But this is about having the right to read our books, and these people don’t have the right to say you can’t.”

Friday, August 20, 2010

Things to Do If You Are a Cow: An Original List Poem

We've been vacationing on an island in Maine. The waterfront house where we are staying is beautiful. Except for one rainy day, we've had gorgeous weather. My daughter and her husband and some of our friends came up to spend a few days with us earlier in the week. We've had a great time. I'm going to hate to leave this place.

I have another of my "things to do" poems for you this week.

THINGS TO DO IF YOU ARE A COW

Graze on a hillside meadow

dotted with dandelion suns.

Breathe in the sweet smell of clover

and freshly mown hay.

Flick flies away with your tasseled tail.

Feel summer days pass by

like silk over silver.

Moo and chew

and chew and moo.

Relax…

enjoy

your grand green view.

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The Poetry Friday Roundup is at Teach Poetry K-12.