An Unusual Book

Once again, I am on the selection committee for next year’s Snow Willow awards. I just finished reading one of the strangest books I’ve ever read and needed to comment on it somewhere. Polly Horvath, award-winning Canadian author has written a book that bewilders me. I loved her Everything on a Waffle, which won a Newbery Honor. I haven’t read anything else, but am aware that several of her books have won multiple awards. Her books are quirky with unusual characters, but in The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane, my question would be, who is going to read this? Told from multiple points of view, which I love, immediately makes this book less accesible to a number of students. One of my good readers told me that the flashbacks in After were confusing for her. Although The Corps is a very clever book, with many eccentric characters all trying to come to terms with grief in their own way, I was at times hard-pressed to continue reading. It just all seemed too unbelievable, and yet not fantasy. Then at the end, all the loose ends were very quickly woven together, and even the normally taciturn uncle spills his heart suddenly. My question to you, Polly Horvath, is,” Who were you writing this book for?” We tell our students to understand who their audience is. If this is for young people, which ones will read and enjoy it? I actually find it difficult to write this because I hold authors in such esteem and you are certainly a very capable author. I am going to read The Canning Season and The Vacation and see if I can make some sense of this for myself.

Breaking News!!

Keturah and Lord Death is a National Book Award finalist- didn’t I make an excellent choice? Actually, I love all the Snow books, but I thought this was kind of neat. As an aside, kids at my school dressed up for Halloween. One of my favourite Grade 6 boys was dressed in a long, flowing black cape. When I asked him what he was, he said”Lord Death,of course!” He was the first to read this book and absolutely loved it. It is now making the rounds in that grade 6/7 classroom as are many of the others. Hats off to the Willows!

Last Post??

No, probably not, I just thought it sounded good. Actually, my hope is that people will continue to contribute their great ideas about how they are incorporating Web 2.0 into their teaching. I’m also hoping people might have time for reviews of some great books.

Even though the formal part of this course is over, and sometimes it felt like climbing a steep hill, I am very thankful for all the possibilities that have come about as a result of it. Thanks, Carleen and Donna. I am amazed at my own enthusiasm. I am also pleased with my teachers, who although I am often speaking a foreign language to them, are willing to take risks with me.

My last assignment is indeed taking a fairly easy route. Several teachers have agreed that incorporating the Snow Willows into an independent reading assignment for Language Arts will work. So I have created a link to the Willows web-site for each of the nominated books; in particular, to the activities which a committee has come up with. Therefore, I’m not doing any re-inventing. Their assignment is to read one book, create a blog response on our library blog, and choose one of the activities to complete. That assignment will then be added to the blog for others to see. If they choose to create a visual, we will add a picture of it, and so on. I’m just in the process of putting together an evaluation sheet, so they will know what the expectations are.

So that’s easy. But next year, I’m already prepared to take a page from Chris’s and Diane’s ideas. I think we’ll have a wiki for the Snow books next year- I like the ease of creating discussion. I also work with older students and Literature Circles a lot, so a wiki will be a great way to go- in fact, probably later this year.

Assignment aside, some other practical applications of my learning are coming about. At one of my schools, the teachers would love to have a list of books to support their teaching in Mathematics. One of our teacher-librarians recently set up a wiki to share great new titles of books that we are reading. So I thought- why not for Math. So instead of working on my looming book order, I set up a Wiki with categories and listed some of the books I knew. Then I showed it to one of the teachers who wished to have this and suggested that this format would allow any and all of them to add to the list as they became aware of, or used titles. She was impressed with the ease of it, and I’ll be showing it at a staff meeting soon. I think it’s also a great way of dividing up the workload.

So hats off to all of you and our fearless leaders who have shown us the way.

By the way, if you subscribe to LibrarianInBlack, you will have received this. A great place to check out many image generators.  http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/     I added it to my del.icio.us account- something else I wouldn’t have bothered with 6 months ago. So we’ve come a long ways and I know there are more challenges ahead but they seem just a little less scary than they used to!!