Welcome!

You have accessed the blog site for Choosing and Using Books for Children. Throughout the term we'll use our blog to record the books we read and the ideas we have for using them when we're teachers. By the end of March, our class will have read at least 280 books. Happy reading!

Two important protocol actions for EVERY post:
1. Underline or italicize all book titles (choose one formatting style and stick with it--underline OR italicize for all book titles)
2. Add your name in the "label" box before you post each documentation.

One important recommendation:
Create your documentations in a separate Word document, then cut and paste in a blog post.

Basic Documentation

Book Title:

Author(s):

Illustrator/Photographer/Artist:

Publisher:

Copyright Date:

Genre:

Brief Annotation:

Your Rating (1-5) and why:

Readers who will like this book:

Teaching Strategy from Tompkins or Yopp & Yopp (you'll link a strategy to at least 10 of your 40 books) :

Question to ask about this book before a read aloud:

Optional, but noted as extra effort:

1. Interest Level (age):

2. Grade Level Equivalent (grade):
Use book wizard to help with the previous 2 areas


3. List awards

4. Does this book have a book trailer? If so, cut and paste the web address here.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Sit-In


Book Title: Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down

Author(s): Andrea Davis Pinkney

Illustrator/Photographer/Artist: Brian Pinkney

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Copyright Date: 2010

Genre: Historical fiction picturebook

Brief Annotation: Sit-In uses ‘cookbook’ storytelling to describe the recipe for nonviolent civil rights protest. The story follows four friends who stand up to segregation in the deep south by staging a sit-in in a local restaurant. Students from other cities hear about their protest and decide to join the movement. This was an important benchmark act leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Your Rating (1-5) and why: (5!) Talking to young children about complex issues like civil rights is a challenging task. Sit-In uses soft, colorful illustrations to depict four friendly faces that combat violence around them in the diner with nonviolence and peace. The book does not focus on violent aspects of racism and the lunch counter sit-ins, but definitely conveys the unfriendly environment these young children faced. It points to an easy discussion of why there was so much hatred, and ways to combat it. 

Readers who will like this book: Readers who will like this book may be students from diverse backgrounds or those who have yet to learn the important stories from the Civil Rights movement.


Question to ask before reading the book: It would depend on the age level of the class, but we could just look at the cover and ask what we notice about the boys. We could talk about if there are differences between friends in our class--what kinds? How do (should) we treat friends who are different from us?
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1 comment:

  1. Suzy Kaback & FamilyFebruary 2, 2012 at 12:01 PM

    I like the way you characterize this book as a "cookbook" approach. That's an apt description of its organizational structure.

    You might be surprised to know that the book is actually classified as nonfiction, so if you're counting it as your only historical fiction book, you'll have to make a change there.

    I'll teach everyone in our class how to tell if a book is actually nonfiction or not--a lot of books these days seem to straddle the genre line, so I'll show you how to tell for sure!

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