Marty Chan

As a teacher-librarian in an elementary school, we use Literature Circles as one of our reading and discussion strategies. We have just begun this using mystery novels with a grade 5 classroom. One of the novels we are using is The Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher by Mart Chan. There are five boys in the group and to say they are engaged, would be an understatement. I sat in on their discussion on Friday and it was a joy to watch them chuckle together as they read interesting passages and wondered what would happen next as the end of Chapter three left them hanging and they knew they couldn’t read ahead. In this group is a young man who has had resource room help through the years and generally is placed with a group that has similar needs. We really wanted to make the groups heterogeneous and based on interest and it was a privilege to see this young man as he joined in the discussion with his peers. They are a fine group as they included him as they would anyone else and I believe we will see our young man’s self-esteem blossom. We specifically requested the parents to read with their son at home and the resource room teacher is also helping with his roles during her time with them.

Marty Chan is also the author of The Case of the Graffiti Ghouls, winner of the Diamond Willow Award for 2007 for Saskatchewan Young Readers’ Award and The Mystery of the Frozen Brains. Each of these has the same main characters which lends to their enjoyment. We also had the opportunity to have Marty as an author visit to my school last year and he was an enormous hit. His humour is understated, droll but he has an absolute twinkle in his eye at all times. The children loved him and I would recommend him highly.

Here are the novels we are using for this unit this time!