Back to Reading! - #SOL18 - 3/12/18

I'm so grateful to the #SOL community for welcoming me each and every time I post a slice. Thank you so very much to the team at Two Writing Teachers for coordinating and hosting this slicing community for the entire month of March for the Slice of Life Challenge. You all rock!!

*During this year's challenge, my plan is to reflect on a slice of my life from that day, or the day before, and write about it. No theme to tie my writing together this year, no plans ahead of time.  Just glimpses into slices of my days. Not having a plan is a very uncomfortable place for me, both as a person and a writer, so fingers crossed for the 19 remaining days!*


As I've referred to in other posts, I have spent a lot of time with enjoyable, easy adult reading in the past few months, with a few great book club selections thrown in as well. But I began to realize it's mid-March, I will soon be teaching a children's literature class to pre-service teachers this May, and I haven't really spent any time recently with children's books. It was time for me to get a bit serious.

In the kidlit world, there are many classrooms and bloggers who participate each Monday in the It's Monday, What Are You Reading? challenge. This is my hybrid of that, as well as my slice for the day.

Here are four books I read this past week, and absolutely loved. I will most definitely be sharing all four of these with my college students this May:

The Word Collector and Be Kind are both picture books that appeal to the goodness in all of us.
Be Kind approaches what it means to truly be kind, even when the situation might not be comfortable. It would elicit great conversation with students.
The Word Collector, at first glance, is definitely a book about wonderful words, and the joy of collecting them. It would definitely be an asset in a word study investigation. But at a closer view, this book is also about sharing and making others feel good by freely giving to them something you love.

Greetings from Witness Protection and Stella Diaz has Something to Say are both chapter books. Once I began reading each of them, I couldn't put them down.
Greetings from Witness Protection is a great suspenseful read, but it also deals with the idea of belonging, and how difficult that is for some people. I was also delighted that it addressed some of the downsides of social media when it comes to protecting your identity. Finally, the artifacts that let us know what the bad guys are up to, are ingenious - lots of great inferring ahead for readers of this book! This would be a great book for middle grade and middle school readers.
Stella Diaz is definitely more of a transitional chapter book (though Amazon cites it as a middle grade read). Regardless, this is a book that would be a great read aloud in class. Stella is actually Mexican-American, but is caught between the two worlds. She is not fluent at all in Spanish (which can make it difficult to converse with some of her relatives), but her English requires her to see a speech therapist, and results in her not feeling confident about sharing in class. Again, a great book about belonging and trying to fit in at school. I can only imagine the wonderful conversations this book would encourage.

I have a stack of 16 more books on my coffee table; hopefully, I will have more to share next week. Until then, happy reading to all!