Bye bye Apostrophe?

According to this article from the Associated Press, one city in England is doing away with apostrophes on their street signs!  Now, I am a bit torn on the issue.  Apostrophes are obviously important in grammar.  But the streets they denote today no longer “belong” to those they are named after, if they even did [...]

Poetry Friday

This week I altered a lesson from Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny McGregor to practice with our schema. The lesson involved listening to a song, reading the lyrics, and jotting our text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections on a graphic organizer. I had never heard the song before but I loved [...]

Adios Oscar! A Butterfly Fable by Peter Elwell

Anytime I see a new monarch butterfly book I get excited, so when I received a review copy of Adios, Oscar!: A Butterfly Fable from Scholastic, I was very happy. Even better? This isn’t your typical monarch migration story. It’s a new twist on the topic and it is great!
Oscar is a [...]

Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing up Scieszka by Jon Scieszka

I was going to do a formal review of Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing up Scieszka this weekend. But then I booktalked it to both classes yesterday. And I haven’t seen it since!
Perhaps this is even better than a formal review. When I read a few [...]

Garden State Teacher Awards Program

Do you know a teacher in NJ who rocks?  From the NJEA:
We feel that excellent teachers are not receiving adequate recognition for their important contribution to society. The Teachers Who Rock program will recognize 24 outstanding teachers to receive this prestigious award. These teachers become lifetime members of the Teachers Who Rock Class. 
Check out the [...]

Tonight PBS will be airing a documentary on NOVA that follows the monarch butterflies to their overwintering grounds in Mexico. Last February I was extremely privileged to visit the sanctuaries in Michoacan and it was a life-changing experience. The NOVA website has a wonderful page dedicated to The Incredible Journey of the Monarch [...]

Books I am Looking Forward to Reading in 2009

I’ve been so caught up in the awards bonanza of late that I realized we are almost out of January and I haven’t posted the books I am looking forward to reading this year.  This is by no means a complete list, but just a few that caught my eye from publisher’s previews, blog reading, [...]

ALA Youth Media Awards (Or, I Read the Newbery!)

While watching the ALA webcast live today, my class kept laughing at me.  I would call out my predictions as the awards were introduced- for the awards besides the Newbery because I shared those predictions with them on Friday.  Of course, I was wrong more than I was right- but the kids didn’t care.  They [...]

Class Newbery Watching and Reaction

(Stay tuned for my personal reactions to the awards today).
At 10am, my students walked out of Spanish class and into the library.  The librarian and I had been trying to get the webcast to work and were at that point desperately watching the mouse move around the screen as our computer tech managed a quick [...]

Welcome, Kelly Gallagher!

Kelly Gallagher, author of the upcoming Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It (available to read online here), has been on a blog tour all week.  Today I am thrilled to introduce him here, at TheReadingZone!  For the past few days, Kelly has been answering questions posed by you, [...]