A Pixton Response to Standardized Testing

Jim Pseudonym's series "No More Teacher's Dirty Looks" is always entertaining. Here's a great one about standardized testing.

Great Teacher Comic

Jim Pseudonym on Pixton.com has a series of hilarious comics about the craziness teachers face every day.  Here's the latest, and it is so relevant.  Enjoy!

Matt Damon Loves Teachers

Diagramming Won't Help This Situation

Because this is wonderful...

Diagramming Won't Help This Situation
     --Kevin Brown
Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them~the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement~and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.

Why I Love Harry Potter



At the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 premier in Trafalgar Square in London.  Picture from Zimbio.com

In the final days ever of the kind of anticipation that only the next installment of a Harry Potter book or movie can bring me (I seriously almost cried at work this morning looking at pictures from the London premier), I've been reflecting on why Harry and the gang have made such a huge impact on me.  I've decided that while Harry Potter is the series that will stick with me forever, it could just as easily have been Twilight, The Hunger Games, Uglies, or whatever the next big young adult series happens to be, that found its way into my heart.  I'll never judge another crazy Twilight girl because if I were their age, I would be one of the craziest among them.  While objectively we can all agree that HP is the better of the two series in question (right?!), its quality of literature is not what made me such a rabid fan... it was its genre.  While I was falling truly, madly, and deeply in love with Harry Potter, I now realize I was really falling in love with young adult literature.

The Spark
As a kid, I always enjoyed reading when books were assigned to me for school or as a way to get out of boring classwork.  I even joined a reading challenge team in fourth grade because my teacher often let me skip worksheets if I was preparing for the competition.  At home, however, I always had better things to do with my time than read a book: I stayed busy with dance, and I loved my Nickelodeon. 

So one Christmas when my mom gave me one of the first Harry Potter books, I was disappointed.  My mom has always been the best giver ever, and I couldn't figure out why she had failed so miserably on this one.  Why along with my super cool flared hip-hugger jeans and awesome portable ballet barre was she giving me a kid book?  A 309-page kid book, but still.  I mumbled a "thanks" and shoved it aside for what I thought would be forever, but one afternoon when I was probably grounded and not allowed to watch tv or something, I picked it up.  It didn't take long until I was hooked.  I was eventually forced to admit that my mom was right about the book and that she is still the world's greatest gift giver.  Thanks, Mom!

The Story
When young adult readers fall in love with a book, it isn't for the magical metaphors or the lilting flow of the words; it's for the story.  They love a fast-paced book that keeps 'em wanting more.  You know a story is good if readers are still dying to know what happens next after a whole year or more has passed since the previous book was released.  The fact that Harry Potter is capturing so much attention thirteen years after it debuted in the United States is a testment to the power of its story. 

I was lucky to meet Harry Potter and his friends at the perfect time--when I was 13, just two years older than Harry when he first travels to Hogwarts and old enough to handle the length of the books--and I feel like I've grown up with the characters and now the actors who play them.  If only I were so glamourous (see Emma Watson below).  When Harry, Ron, and Hermione were dealing with mountains of homework, so was I; and when they were dealing with the awkwardness of crushes, yep, been there, too.  Thank goodness I didn't have to face the horror of a powerful evil wizard wanting me dead, but that's what makes it a good story: the suspense and fantasy that keep us turning pages mixed with the characters and everyday experiences that are relatable.  Harry Potter fully delivers with its story.  We laugh with it, we cry with it, and we beg for more.



At the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 premier in Trafalgar Square in London.  Picture from BBC.com

The Community
Besides the story, the second thing young adult readers love about the genre is the community they instantly become a part of when they open a popular book.  In seventh grade my friends and I were all completely obsessed, and not having read the two books that were out at the time made one a pariah in our eyes.  I thought I had committed a mortal sin when I spoiled the end of the second HP book for a my friend during one of our many fights.  We liked to pretend to be our favorite characters and act out scenes from the books as well as making up our own.  (Did I mention I was super cool?) 

This was our low-tech version of fanfiction in our Harry Potter community that extended to our friends across the hall at school.  But young adult readers today enjoy worldwide fan communities that are instantly accessible online.  Young adult authors are doing a great job of creating digital worlds for their books (see the YA series links above and my previous post about Pottermore), the books are being adapted into movies and comics (such as Twilight: The Graphic Novel), and fans are contributing to the mania by blogging, chatting, creating websites, and writing fanfiction.  Even in the adult world, my office is buzzing with excitement for the upcoming movie.  Who doesn't love shared enthusiasm?

The Launch
Once a young adult reader has found The One, he or she will often search all over looking for something to fill the hole left when the beloved series is finished or while waiting for the next installment.  The search often leads one to becoming a greater part of the fan community.  This can involve literary analysis in discussing the books in person and in lively online debates.  Fans also like to talk about the differences between the books and the movie adaptations and often end up analyzing the importance of these differences and how they affect the story.  Along with improving literary analysis skills, participants in fan communities can also improve their reading and writing skills by blogging, reading and writing fanfiction, reading everything they can find related to the series, and enjoying many other literary-based activities. 

Young adult readers missing their favorite series might instead turn to other literature in hope of finding something else they'll enjoy just as much.  They might pick up what schools think of a "classic literature," or they might not.  Either way, these readers are improving their literary skills by fully engaging with a text they love.  As an English teacher, that is what I love to see.

Although Harry Potter did not teach me how to read as it did the Brazillians pictured above, it did help me become a reader, and so I, too, say "Thanks, Jo!"

To Tweet or Not To Tweet

In The New York Times

I borrowed this title from a not-so-great New York Times article in which Maureen Dowd interviewed Biz Stone and Evan Williams, creators of Twitter.  The entire article consists of Dowd berating Twitter and Stone and Williams doing little to try to make her change her mind, which given her remark that the pair has "destroy[ed] civilization as we know it" was probably the smart thing to do.  Dowd comes off as a close-minded jerk, and the Twitter creators show they understand that their site is not for everyone but has a real place in social media, citing the role Twitter has played in the revolutions in the Middle East.  The best line in the article comes when Dowd asks if Shakespeare would have used Twitter, and Stone replies, "Brevity’s the soul of wit, right?"

In Film

Page One: Inside the New York Times is a new documentary that follows a few NYT reporters over the course of a year at the beginning of the rise of social media as a source for news and the subsequent decrease in circulation of print media.  One of the reporters who caught my eye was Brian Stelter, a young up-and-comer dedicated to new media including Twitter.  The star of the documentary, David Carr, says of Stelter, “I still can’t get over the feeling that Brian Stelter was a robot assembled in the basement of The New York Times to come and destroy me.”  And that's the way many print journalists feel about new media.  Below is a clip from PBS news show Need to Know (which I love) discussing the film with Stelter and Carr.  Stelter's brief discussion of Twitter leaves the audience with no questions as to his feelings about the social networking site.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

In the Classroom



The debate is raging among educators about the place social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc., should have in the classroom, if any.  I plan on researching and writing a future post about different ways to use Twitter in the classroom, but as for now I will not take a firm stand.  Not having used Twitter myself, I am not yet able to give an educated response on the subject.  However, I am intrigued by the use of Twitter in schools, and this video provides an interesting example of a digital classroom.

Glogster

Glogster is another cool medium for presenting information.  This is a glog, a graphic blog, one of my friends from college made in grad school.  She interviewed several graffiti artists in a local high school, and created the glog to share their story and knowledge.



Glogster could be a great way for teachers and students to share what they know. Visit the full-size page to see the glog in more detail.

Wordle

I entered the text of Alice in Wonderland into Wordle's word cloud generator and came up with this.  Click to see the full-size, clear image and to visit Wordle.



This could be a cool way for students to visualize key words and ideas in a text.  The font and color options can also set the tone of the book.

Prezi

Prezi is and web-based service that allows users to create online presentations that do so much more than PowerPoint.  You work with one screen so that your audience can see the big picture, and then you zoom in for details.  Check out the one I made about Rodman Philbrick, who by the way is a fabulous young adult author, for one of my graduate school classes. 

Rodman Philbrick on Prezi

Prezi is free for anyone with a (dot)edu email address.  It is relatively easy to use and quick to learn and would be a great way to engage students during lessons or to give them an outlet for presenting their own information.  My attempt resulted in a relatively simple presentation, but if you take the time, Prezi offers many cool effects that can make your work shine. 

Take some time to explore the Prezi database to see some really great examples.  The following example isn't super relevant to the blog or anything, but it's a great example of what you can do with Prezi.

Future-Proof Your Education on Prezi

Pottermore

Two of my favorite things are coming together: Harry Potter and new media!  J.K. announced today that Pottermore, an interactive Harry Potter experience will be out in October.  Not sure what it entails... it may be a big flop or just a money-making ploy, but I'm excited and optimistic.  Hopefully it will prove to be a great medium for developing literacy skills.  And hopefully it will keep that Harry Potter spark alive!  I'm so not ready for the journey to end.

Writing with Rap

While in grad school, I had the great opportunity to work one-on-one with a fifth-grader over several weeks.  I was tasked with having him respond to a piece of literature in a way that was meaningful to him.  He chose to read Drive-By by Lynne Ewing, a novel about a boy whose older brother is killed in a drive-by shooting and has to learn to survive without him.

When we started to talk about what kind of product he wanted to create about the book, his school insecurities came out.  He didn't think he was a good artist and didn't want to take any risks on a creative project.  He also decided that he really wanted to write about football.  After a discussion about why he loved football and what he thought might have happened if the main character had played football, he decided to try to write a letter to the character to convince him to join a football team.  We tried brainstorming to get ideas for the letter, and I quickly realized that his go-to method, cluster diagrams, was not working for him because he thought in sentences, not topics.

I remembered that he had said he loved Drake and other rappers, and he said he thought he could rap, too.  I played some music and had him start talking/rapping to the main character while I typed what he said.  We rearranged the sentences, filled in what was needed, and he turned the words into a rap song.  I let him record the song, and I burned him a copy on cd for him to keep.  He seemed to be really proud that he had created something smart and cool that he could share with his friends and family, and I learned a valuable lesson about finding alternate routes to meet the same learning goals.

Below is a video I made explaining the creative process and showcasing his rap.

Memoir About Life With Asperger's

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robinson

Interesting fact #1:  John Elder Robinson is Augusten Borroughs's older brother.  We've read about him in nearly all of AB's works, and now we finally have a chance to get his point of view. 

I picked up this book looking for more information about Asperger's Syndrome from a first-hand account, not for a laugh, but in Look Me in the Eye I found both.  A story about growing up with Asperger's during a time when no one knew what it was and so assumed those affected were lazy or even psychopathic would have been interesting on its own.  Likewise, we've seen in Borrough's works that their almost-too-bizarre-to-be-real family makes for some disturbing yet enthralling reading.  Combine the two experiences and you've got a childhood few of us could have survived and the grounds for a fascinating memoir.

Interesting fact #2:  Robinson's adult life is just as strange as his childhood.

He dropped out of high school at just sixteen years of age having made an almost perfect score on the GED, spent his newly found free time alternating between living in the woods and helping his like-minded friends with experiments that often ended with explosions and giant fires, and got his big break when he impressed Pink Floyd's sound crew with his knowledge of audio electronics.  This led to a brief career modifying guitars to do things like smoke, glow, shoot sparks, and explode for Ace Frehley, Kiss's lead guitarist.  He also worked as an engineer in a toy factory, tried his hand at climbing the corporate ladder, and ended up owning his own business.

The most important fact you need to know before reading the book:

Robinson's is a great success story.  For much of his life, what he wanted more than anything was to have real friends and to understand what people expect of him during conversations and other interactions.  He dedicated himself to studying proper social responses in different situations and has had successful careers, has been married, and is a father.  Robinson has also made great strides in understanding his feelings, which is what enabled him to write this book.  As an adult, he is able to look back on his earlier years and write about what he was feeling even though he didn't understand it at the time.  This reflection along with the humor Robinson's life story brings makes this work a powerful memoir.

Follow John Elder Robinson
Blog
Website

Games for Word Nerds

The workload as a legislative proofreader is inconsistent to say the least. Some weeks we have work to do from the second we arrive until it is time to leave in the afternoon. We have also worked the occasional weekend or evening. My record is 8am to 9:30pm during one particularly busy week. I've even seen people tracked down in the bathroom because of some desperate situation or other.

Other times we sit around for weeks with no work to do, waiting on the next step of the law-making process to begin. We often have way too much free time on our hands and have gotten pretty good at finding things to do so our heads don't explode with boredom. Hence my blogging at three o'clock in the afternoon.

One of our early favorites was Merriam Webster's word games. These include your classic flash word games such as crosswords, jumbles, and my favorites, cryptograms, but there are also less common games such as a mah jong-inspired game in which you clear all the letter tiles by spelling words and letter rip in which you try to find all the words that can be spelled with the given letters. These games can be addicting and a good way to improve your spelling, vocabulary, and logic while wasting some time.

One of my long-time favorites is Free Rice, a vocabulary game that also works to feed the world's hungry.  For every question you answer correctly, you earn more grains of rice that are given away by the UN World Food Programme (WFP).  This is a great cause and a great way to improve your vocabulary.  I highly recommend you check it out!

I also love Bookworm, a game similar to Boggle in that you spell words with tiles in a grid-like formation, but there are also bonus tiles and the threat of fire to add excitement.  It's another addicting game that helps you learn new words.

Pixton for Schools

As I've mentioned before, I'm slightly obsessed with Pixton.com, and it seems that a lot of educators are.  I have used it for my grad school classes and for fun, and I hope I will have a chance to give my students the same opportunity to use it as a satisfying outlet for their ideas and creativity as I have.  Even in my interim between grad school and my first teaching job, I still log onto Pixton fairly regularly because I love the site.  This following video should help you understand the benefits of using Pixton in the classroom and might even hook you as a personal user.

One of my favorite Pixton comics, ebabin, writes about her experiences in her classroom, and they are always very entertaining.  She sets her comic characters and props against a background of photos from her classroom, which gives her comics an authentic feel.




Another great Pixon educator comic is slickscience, who creates comics to use with students to teach them science concepts such as physical and chemical changes as seen below.



Take some time to check out the rest of ebabin and slickscience's comics, as well as Pixton's other top authors.  And while you're at it, you could always look through my comics, too!

Strategy Tutor

One of the coolest teaching resources I discovered while in grad school was Strategy Tutor, a website that allows teachers to create web-based units with built-in text entry boxes that allow students to complete assignments online within the site, and interactive, animated coaches that teach students different reading strategies: summarize, predict, question, clarify, visualize, feeling, reflect, web evaluation, media literacy, and journal.

Strategy Tutor was created by a group of educators including one of my favorite professors at Vanderbilt, Dr. Dalton.  (Their blog, Literacy Beat, is listed in the sidebar.)  Strategy Tutor is a free website, but you must create an account to be able to access all of the features.  As a member, you can create your own lessons and units, share your work with other teachers, and adapt other teachers' work to meet the needs of your classes.  The site is really easy to use after taking a little time to get to know it, and it gives you a medium to create safe, guided web-based learning activities.  Please explore the site, and I highly recommend you join. Here's a link to a mini unit I created for one of my grad school classes, but as a guest, you will not be able to see it now exactly as you and your students will once you all become registered. 

Listopia on Goodreads.com

In my last post, I mentioned that you can use the book lists on Goodreads.com to help you find the next book to read.  After some more exploring, I'm even more obsessed with Goodreads and the book lists provided by Listopia.  I spent several hours yesterday exploring the lists and came up with a long list of my own of books I need to read soon.  In the process, I discovered that you can vote for your favorite books to be added to and moved up on different lists and consequently wasted even more time. 

But the point of this post is to share some of the most useful lists I found.  By browsing by tags (on the right hand column), I found pages and pages of lists dedicated to the best young adult books, the most popular of which being Best Young Adult Books.  The lists are divided by genre, subject, year, etc., and are extremely user friendly for teachers and students alike.  One list in particular students might enjoy is YA Novels by Goodreads Authors.  A Goodreads author is one who is an active participant on Goodreads.com.  Authors can blog on their pages; embed videos, pictures, and other media; and link to their personal websites and blogs.  I think students will appreciate the accessiblity to their favorite authors that Goodreads provides, and the list can help them find more books to read if this accessibility is important to them.  I greatly look forward to sharing Goodreads with my future students.

Some other lists that kept me occupied yesterday for longer than I would have liked, but I just couldn't quit:
Best Books of the Decades: 2000's
Books That Everyone Should Read at Least Once
Best Books of the 20th Century

Enjoy!

What Next?

Having just finished grad school coming straight out of college coming straight out of high school, this year has been the first in my life that hasn’t been filled with assigned reading.  I started out excited because I had always complained that I never got to read what I wanted to, but now I miss being handed really great literature without having to do any research to find it for myself.  Sure, I always had my summers to read whatever I wanted, but I mostly spent my time catching up on the classics I thought I needed to read that we had missed in school.  But after discovering the hilarity of Dave Eggers, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Chuck Klosterman, and the list goes on, I realized I what had been missing out on: reading for pure enjoyment, no higher purposes.  They took me back to the days I first fell in love with Harry Potter back in middle school.  (Yes, I’m showing my age here.)  I’ve missed that thrill of reading, and have been working on getting it back.

Still keeping up my teacher preparations in my off-year, I try to alternate one adult book just for fun with a young adult book or two to add to my repertoire.  Young adult books are easy to find; I’ve bought enough of them over the years to fill my future classroom library that Amazon does a pretty great job recommending good ones to me.  But I don’t buy as many of my adult books because I don’t have a reason to keep them, so Amazon can’t do me as much good there.  To help me in my search for good books, I started looking for a website with rating and recommendation features similar to Netflix.  Netflix makes it so easy to find movies and TV shows I’ll love, and I thought we book lovers deserve the same service.  While I haven’t found anything quite as easy and detailed as Netflix for books, I have come across a few helpful sites.

Literature Map

Literature Map is an easy-to-use web of authors.  When you enter one of your favorite authors, a cloud of other authors appears around your author.  The closer two authors’ names are together, the more likely a reader will like both.  Within webs, you can click on different authors to quickly view their webs as well.  The Map is always evolving to add new authors and uses information site visitors enter to populate the web, so there are some mistakes.  For example, Stephenie Meyer appears in some webs several times with her name spelled different ways, and I shouldn’t be judgmental because I just had to correct the way I spelled her name.  I found that the webs did a good job of grouping many of my favorite authors together, so the site seems to be fairly accurate.  Although you cannot use the Literature Map to see any of the books the authors have written or view any biographical information, the Map is a good starting point when looking for new authors to explore.




Literature Map for Franz Kafka

 

What Should I Read Next?

This is a really straightforward site in which you enter a book you like, and it gives you a long list of books that are similar.  This site is also run by reader input, so I can’t be sure how close the recommendations are to what you enter, but I will probably try a couple of them.  Big picture: It’s free, it’s easy, and it gives you actual book titles instead of just author names.  There is an option to register, which may give you more information and control over your recommendations, but I’ve been too afraid of being bombarded by emails to try.  Let me know if you’re braver than I am.



Sample list of recommendations.

 

Goodreads

This is by far the most elaborate and accurate site of the three, and I have been a registered member for several months.  Members can rate books they’ve read, create bookshelves to organize those books by categories you choose, enter books you are reading and plan on reading, and of course receive recommendations for new books to read.  One drawback is that the site does not automatically recommend books based on your ratings like Netflix does: you can explore books to read by browsing bookshelves of members who like some of the same books you do and looking through the many helpful lists of books, or you can ask a Goodreads friend (you know, like Facebook friends) to recommend something for you.  On Goodreads you can also participate in discussion groups and book clubs and recommend books to your friends.  So far, I love it!


Some featured book lists. 
(I'm particularly attracted to the best strange and twisted memoirs.)

 Hope you find these helpful!  I think young adult readers would find these helpful, too.  Let me know if you know of any other or better book recommendation sites.

the hunt is on...

It’s been over a year since I updated this blog, and I think the time is right to take it in a new direction.  I have finished my graduate program at Vanderbilt with and M.Ed.  Yay!  Unfortunately, graduating in August, writing my thesis during prime job hunting time, and having no idea where I wanted to live until late July resulted in no teaching job for me this school year.  I’ve worked a couple of unrelated but pretty cool jobs to fill the year and my bill collectors’ pockets.

My first stop was in a preschool for kids with developmental delays.  I loved those kids, but apparently a masters degree in secondary English education does not help you one bit in teaching itty bitty kiddos.  They walked all over me, and in the end, I decided that they really needed someone who could do a much better job for them than I could.  Plus, I needed to retain my sanity for the kids I can hopefully do much better with.

My current job is working for the Bureau of Legislative Research at the Arkansas State Capitol.  During the legislative session, I proofed bills before they went to the House and Senate to be voted on.  Now we’re getting all the new laws edited and ready to be sent off to the publisher and checking to make sure the publishers don’t make mistakes.  There was a pretty big controversy last session in which an unintended ”not” made it legal for Arkansans of any age, babies on up, to get married.  Whoops!  That’s why they need me and my awesome coworkers.

Now I’m working my booty off trying to get a real teaching job for the fall.  I’ve had a few interviews and some great responses to my inquiries, but so far no news.  It amazes me how long schools drag this out!  One school district I’ve contacted says they won’t even start looking until June.  Come on people, you’re making my hair turn white.  I’m really ready for some certainty in my life for a while.  And so ready to use what I’ve been studying for 5+ years now.

Wish me luck!

Vanderbilt Reflection

One of my last assignments for my Vanderbilt career was to write a reflection on my online experiences with educators.  I made a comic on Pixton.com, a really cool, easy-to-use online comic builder.  I have used it for several comics, including my series about my old cat Smelly (I think they’re pretty entertaining.  Check them out!), and can’t wait for an opportunity for students to create their own Pixton comics.

To view the online teaching community comic, click and drag the comic side-to-side to see hidden panels.

Discworld Series

The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett has been around for nearly thirty years now, but it is new to me and probably to many young adult readers. The series, which features wizards, wordplay, and wit, is a hilarious look into an alternate universe of magic. I think any young reader (or adult) who loves fantasy and silliness would enjoy this series. It should be appropriate for readers as early as seventh grade. Enjoy!

Books for Reluctant Readers

ALA’s website has a section for YA literature with booklists updated every year, including one for reluctant readers.  There are tons of recommendations that look great.  The “Top Ten” lists are especially helpful.  This site is not the easiest to navigate, but the content is totally worth it.
I’d love to hear of any other great book lists (perhaps more condensed) for reluctant YA readers if you know of any!

Rodman Philbrick Online

Philbrick is probably best know in the young adult literature world for Freak the Mighty, the story of an unusual pair of friends who go on adventures. I highly recommend this book. Philbrick’s website is a great resource for kids. It offers the standard information about the author, the books, and the awards, but it is obvious that Philbrick genuinely cares about his fans. He has posted pictures of himself, listed his mailing address and promised to read and reply to every letter he receives, answers the top ten questions he is asked, links teaching guides for his books that he has received, and encourages young authors to write and try to get published. He included links for the Scholastic writing contests with advice to be very careful about following the rules for entry because it is very easy to be disqualified. His links to information about the movie made from Freak the Mighty, information about the medical condition one of the boys in that book has, and to his personal blog are all a great touch for the site.

I am most impressed, however, by the fact that he shares the play he has written for Freak the Mighty. He says that he has heard from many teachers who have staged versions of the book and movie, and he thinks it is wonderful. When one of his close friends wanted to stage the book, he wrote a one-act and later a two-act version. He tried to get the play published, but when it was rejected, he decided to just give it to anyone who wants it. If you send him an email address, he will send the scripts for either the one-act or two-act versions in a PDF file for free. It is exciting to see a young adult author who is so willing to help kids and teachers.

This is a great site for a great author.  Check it out!

Two New Books

I’ve come across two new books I know students will love: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (and Jane Austen) and I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want To Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb.  I really enjoyed both books and am excited to share them with students.

In P&P&Z, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy still find time to love and hate each other, but only in their time off from being action stars who must fight off zombies.  Girls will love Austen’s romance, and boys will be enthralled with the ninja zombie-killing skills.  This book could be great scaffolding into Jane Austen, but also just fun.


Click here for Goodreads review.

 In Genius, readers are told that we are being given a rare view into seventh-grader Oliver Watson’s plot to take over the world starting with his middle school.  This wildly funny book shows us that all of us, even the evil geniuses among us, deal with the same annoying struggles such as trying to make our parents proud and finding the acceptance we didn’t know we cared about.



Click here for Goodreads review.



Blog

This is a blog I’ve created for my Reading and Learning with Print and New Media class.  I’m interested in learning all I can about teaching middle school English, particularly ways to help kids become better readers.  I’d love to see any ideas you have about ways to help students develop their reading skills and anything fun you’ve come across that kids might like to read.  I’m collecting books for a classroom library and would love suggestions.  Thanks!