Great Job!

Congratulations to the following students who met their summer reading challenge:

Eighth: Cara, Sofia, Claire, Justin, Caleb, Tressa, Avery, Casie, Nick, Colin, Leah

Seventh: Eviana, Chase, Madison, Taylor, Mathew, Maggie, Aaron, Sinead

Sixth: Jimmy, Jacqueline, Mary, Andrew

Fifth: Francesca, Amy, Lex

Third: Katie

Second: Carissa

First: Erin

Kindergarten: Landon

Congratulations to the Classroom Super-readers:

Cara, Casie, Leah, Taylor, Maggie, Sinead, Jacqueline, Mary, Francesca, Amy, Lex, Katie, Carissa, Erin, Landon

Super-readers from fifth through eighth grades will be celebrating with a pizza lunch on Wednesday, but since I have class when the lower grades go to lunch, I can't do a pizza lunch for them--I will be bringing them a little treat instead.

I hope everyone had fun and grew as a reader this summer. I really enjoyed doing the summer reading challenge with you. See you next summer!

Summer's End?

Well, it's Wednesday night, August 17--tomorrow we go back to school. Did you meet your summer reading challenge? I hope you will check out the book list and see what people have read--it's really interesting to see who reads what.

Look for a few more posts before we wrap up the challenge, as I know several students have met the challenge but have not emailed me about it. If you didn't email me, talk to me at school and let me know how you did.

Up All Night

Have you ever become so involved in a book that you stay up reading it long past when you should be asleep? That happened to me a few weeks ago. I was reading Divergent, which is a novel for and about young adults, and it is very fast-paced, like many young adult novels. I picked it up to read in bed right before I fell asleep, and—well, I just didn’t fall asleep. Nope--not until it was about 4:00 a.m. and I was finished with the book. As you can imagine, I was pretty cranky the next day. But it’s not the first time I’ve done that, and it probably won’t be the last.



August Already!

It’s August! Aaaaauuuuuugggghhh! In less than two weeks we’ll be back in school! (Actually, I’ve been there on and off all summer, and the teachers will all be there starting this coming Tuesday, August 9—but that’s not the REAL back-to-school. The REAL back-to-school is when the students come back.)

How is you reading going? Have you met your goal? If not, do you have a strategy to meet it? I haven’t actually done the numbers, but I think I’m several books shy of my goal—so my strategy is to put the hard books on the back burner and read a bunch of fun stuff in these last few days.

Check out the book list, though, for some folks who really set a goal and read steadily to meet it. Also, there are a few reviews there that might interest you.



You've got to listen to this . . . .

My daughter is working in Charleston for the summer, and one thing that I’ve missed this summer is having her read funny bits out loud to me from the book she’s reading—and of course getting to read funny bits out loud to her from the book I’m reading. (This suggests that we are always reading funny books; that’s not exactly the case, but as you can tell from the book list, I usually have several books running at once, and generally at least one is funny, or at least has funny bits.)

People tend to think of reading as a solitary act, but I think one of the fun things about reading is sharing what you are reading with other people. That’s why people join book clubs, and read and write book blogs, and read funny (or otherwise interesting) bits out loud to each other.

On Sunday my daughter called me up. “You’ve got to listen to this,” she said, and proceeded to read to me from an article she was reading about ESP experiments. Although it was not meant to be funny, it was hilarious, and the more she read, the more we cracked up. The experiments were all classic cases of so-called scientists who had already decided beforehand what they wanted their experiments to prove, so they distorted the interpretation of the results to conform to their cock-eyed theories. The experiments got more and more absurd; the one I remember as the silliest was one in which the “scientist” was experimenting with cockroaches and came up with results that surprised him—so he concluded that the cockroaches must be using mind-control to manipulate the results!

How do you think the cockroach mind-control theory will work on your next science fair project? I have a feeling Mrs. Tomana will not be impressed.

I got this picture from a site for coloring book pictures! What little kid wants to color a picture of a cockroach?

Are you all a-hoo or all a-tanto?

Two of the books I’ve read recently have been full of vocabulary that is foreign to me: in H.M.S. Surprise it’s nautical terminology and in Uncle Tungsten it’s the language of chemistry and physics and medicine.

I know it’s good for me to have the experience of reading something that I don’t fully understand, because it helps me to sympathize more with the experience of students who don’t understand what we read in class. It’s especially useful to experience vocabulary struggles because it reminds me of how important it is to learn strategies and responses to use when you don’t know a word.

By far my most frequently used strategy for decoding words is using context clues—that is, figuring out what a word means by seeing how it’s used in a sentence. In H.M.S. Surprise, characters refer to a situation as being “all a-hoo”—that is, all messy and disorganized—or “all a-tanto”—that is, running smoothly and neatly. You can imagine that in both these cases, it’s easy to figure out the meaning from the context of the surrounding sentence or sentences.

I must admit, though, that sometimes I rely a little too heavily on this strategy and don’t go to the dictionary as often as I should—even when I’m reading on my Kindle, which has a built-in dictionary!

Have you even played the game Fictionary? It’s a great game for creative thinkers. Ask me about it when we get back to school—maybe we will have a Fictionary game day. It’s easy to play—all you need is a dictionary.

Shuttle Launch

Did you watch the Space Shuttle launch last Friday? Because we don't have cable, I couldn't find it on TV,  so I watched it on my computer on NASA TV. There you don't have all the news commentators, so there's lots of silence--what you hear is all the people who are actually working the launch talking about checklists and all sorts of details that pretty much make no sense to viewers who, like me, are not rocket scientists. But you can kind of get the main idea of what's going on.

When I was in junior high and high school I read a lot of science fiction; I especially loved stories about space exploration. Later I read The Right Stuff and Rocket Boys and other nonfiction about the space program. (I'm still a huge fan of comic science fiction about space travel like Dr. Who and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) It's fascinating to me: space is so endless, so unimaginable--so beyond.

One of the most moving things about the launch on NASA TV was listening to the many different people who had to give a "go" before the launch--people from all different task groups and places checking in one last time to say that their tasks were done, that they had done their part in this huge endeavor. I found it very inspiring. I think it's a real privilege to be able to have a hand in doing something this significant, and I got the sense that these people truly appreciated how fortunate they had been to have a part in it.