It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

 

 

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a meme hosted by Sheila at Book Journey as a way to share what you have read and/or reviewed in the past week. It's also a terrific way to find out what other people are reading.

Jen Vincent, of Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee Moye of Unleashing Readers have given this meme a children's literature focus: picture books, middle grade novels, etc. They encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting the other bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

 

Wow! It's been a long time since I've posted anything on my blog. I was afraid this would happen once school started and everything is so hectic!  Unfortunately, the pace of my reading has slowed down as well.

 

 Two-Minute Mysteries by Donald J. Sobol

 

At school, I've been reading this book to my fifth graders. They're short mysteries/puzzles to read and solve. I've been using it as a way to help my students learn to listen closely to details. I was only going to read the first few out loud as a listening minilesson. But they seem to enjoy them so much, that I'm going ahead and reading several every day. This book is by the same author that wrote the Encyclopedia Brown series. I have several of those in my classroom library, and the students have become more interested in them since I started reading Two-Minute Mysteries.

 

 

 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket #1) by Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake (Illustrator) I know it's crazy, but this is another book that I somehow never got around to reading, until now! I enjoyed it a lot. It's a fun tour of the factory, and everyone gets what they deserve. I borrowed this copy from school and I am pretty sure I have some 5th graders that would enjoy reading it. Be careful, though - it's kind of hard to read without plenty of chocolate around! We had more fun with the story over the weekend. We borrowed both movies from the library (the 1971 version with Gene Wilder and the 2005 version with Johnny Depp). We watched them both and had a great time eating candy and comparing the two films. I STILL live the book version the best!

Art-Rageous (Finley Flowers #4) by Jessica Young Finley Flowers is a fun character to read about. She's very creative and sensitive. As her class goes on a field trip to an art museum and completes a group project about art, she decides she wants to be a famous artist when she grows up. The book provides great ideas for budding young artists to try. It also provides a recipe for the pumpkin bread the characters eat for dessert one evening.