December 15, 2023 · book review
For the littlest ones (babies/toddlers!): 1. How We Eat by Shuli de la Fuente-Lau - we love food in our families (and together as a duo)! This book nails it for us for the content and especially for the inclusion, the real photos of sweet kiddos and their diverse families enjoying food in so many ways. This one is fantastic for the baby who is enjoying looking at faces AND will be fun and has tons of content to talk about together for years to come. (The 4 year old has this book memorized and went through a phase where he read it almost every day before bed!) 2. Dog’s First Baby / Cat’s First Baby by Natalie Nelson - We were gifted these last holiday season and I love them. POC mamas, cute brown little babies, simple images, simple text that delivers and adorable message. Refreshing from what has been out in the board book market and a great gift for the families you know with pets! 3.
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March 27, 2023 · book review
This cover image and all in this post are from goodreads . Find us on there if you want LOTS of book recommendations. BABY BOOKS I LOVE THEM BABY BOOKS I LOVE THEM Baby baby baby books.. I looooooove them. (sung to the unicorns I love them song from Despicable Me) No one will get this reference but this is how my brain works, alas. We’ve had 3!? New babies in our lives this Spring. All nearing the 2 month ish mark and I feel that means it is officially time to start overwhelming their parents with board books. I joke!! Sort of. In the world of all the baby crap and the ways people can be supportive postpartum, baby gifts can be more fraught/annoying/clutterful than helpful. Quick tips if you are gifting to postpartum loved ones (from my perspective and my perspective only!) Food- always helpful. (groceries, bagels & fixings delivered to their house, Spoonful of comfort soup, a takeout
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March 2, 2022 · book review
The picture book bracket for this year. So many good books! Happy March! I usually find there is so much to look forward to this month: spring, Women’s History Month, spring break (at my school at least), more sun, and MARCH BOOK MADNESS! March Book Madness is exactly what it sounds like. It is March Madness, but for books! There are 3 categories: picture books, middle grade books, and young adult books. Each gets its own bracket and anyone can vote on the website for each round. They start with 16 books (“Sweet 16”) and have “games” between two books and slowly go through rounds until we reach the championship. When I taught 5th grade, we followed the middle grade bracket, and in 3rd we follow the picture book bracket. It is so much fun and gets students excited about reading in so many ways. Often, students who are resistant to trying out a new genre are happy to expand their reading
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January 30, 2022 · book review
We wrote about this last spring, but wanted to share that Anti-Oppressive Education in Elite Schools: Promising Practices and Cautionary Tales From the Field is out (Nina received her copy!). We co-authored a chapter and it’s very exciting to see our words in print. You can read more about the book and enjoy some excerpts (including our chapter and an interview with us) here . We’ve been lucky enough to work with Katy Swalwell in the past and Gabby knows Ayo Magwood who we hope to collaborate with in the future. They are both doing really important work and are definitely worth following, but really the whole book has so much to offer. Please let us know what you
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November 2, 2021 · book review
Image credit: Goodreads.com I just finished From the Desk of Zoe Washington by Janae Marks and this book has so much potential for classroom use! It is a delightful read and a wonderful middle grade novel to share with kids in many ways. The main character is having both friend and family drama which will be so relatable to many upper elementary students and middle schoolers. Also, she loves to bake and wants to be a pastry chef so the descriptions of cupcakes alone will pull some students in. I’ve always loved books that included letters between characters, and Zoe (the main character) exchanges letters with her biological father, Marcus, who is in prison. Many students (and adults) don’t hear any humanizing stories about people who are incarcerated or the toll our massive incarceration rates has on families and children. Zoe’s father, Marcus, says he is innocent, and Zoe talks to her
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August 9, 2021 · book review
Cover image from Milo Imagines the World by Matt de la Pena, published earlier this year. While “teacher new year,” as I call the beginning of the school year, is normally my favorite time of year, I am having a hard time with the uncertainty surrounding the beginning of the school year and am still processing everything that happened last year. I’m sure many others are feeling the same way (including lots of our students!). However, it is August already, so back to school is around the corner. So I am thinking about books I want to read to my students at the beginning of the year or have read in years past as sharing books with kids is always something I enjoy, whether it’s done at a distance, virtually, or side by side! These are books that came to mind or that I’ve used in the past, but obviously the possibilities are endless. Hopefully this list will help you with some back to
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May 13, 2021 · book review
Take a peek a 3 books of poetry we turned to this
May 22, 2018 · book review
Oh how we love representation, it is so essential and of course, it benefits all of us. As we typically note, designated 'months' for any given demographic of humans is not something we follow-- every day is a day to learn about communities and cultures you do or don't belong to! However, we do appreciate the added push for elevating underrepresented voices and perspectives! Representation was our focus this month, ensuring that as many API perspectives were integrated into our daily learning as possible. Here are a few resources that our students especially loved during "API Heritage Month"! Representation through awesome characters: Aru Shah and the End of Time and The Serpent's Secret (both pictured above) are both great adventure novels were tons of fun, and both were packed with mythology and had bright heroines! We felt like we learned a lot and the world building in both was
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November 6, 2017 · book review
A photo from our end of our read aloud celebration. Our first chapter book read aloud this year was Save Me a Seat by Gita Varadarajan and Sarah Weeks. It’s an amazing book for so many reasons, and was the perfect first read aloud for our class. While we felt it allowed for natural segues into many of the beginning of the school year discussions and activities, it’s a perfect book for anytime of the year. There are two narrators which leads to two vastly different perspectives (often on the same event). Our students reflected often on how two people can experience the same events very differently. This helped them brainstorm ways to be understanding and empathic. One of our students referenced part of the book as an explanation of how misunderstandings happen and why assumptions are dangerous. One of the main characters, Ravi, is a new student (and recent immigrant). His experiences
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July 20, 2017 · book review
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech is our read aloud for the last few months of the school year. Aside from being an incredibly captivating story with beautiful writing, it also fits perfectly with our curriculum as we are studying storytelling (and Sal, the main character, is telling a story) and American Indian studies (Sal has Indigenous ancestors and visits sacred Native sites). We also study Health & Wellness so the budding young romance is perfect for our class to experience as well. There are also many other relevant and significant issues skillfully woven into this story (mental illness and the related stigma, family dynamics, and gender equality, to name a few). We have a bin full of books by Sharon Creech that we only bring out of the closet (with a lot of fanfare) when we start reading Walk Two Moons . Soon, the books are fought over (especially Absolutely Normal Chaos as it
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December 15, 2016 · book review
Crazy Hair b y Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean This is one of our favorite books! Ms. Arca reads this one, but we both relate. Summary : This book is a rhyming text (we call it a poem) in which a little girl asks the main character why his hair is so "crazy". He responds with the most dazzling array of answers. There are beasts that live in his hair, and a circus, and hot air balloons.. The art is also phenomenal. Each stanza ends with "..inside my crazy hair" and even our 5th graders will fill in that section and join in the reading. How we use it: We use this text in our poetry unit . We LOVE it. This is one of the last poems that we have our students write in the unit because it is more personal. The prompt for this poem is to take back ownership and claim an aspect of yourself that you sometimes feel insecure, judged, or uncomfortable about. I (Ms. Arca) then talk about how even though
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