It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? –From Picture Books to YA is a weekly meme started by Jen at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee at Unleashing Readers. This is a chance for bloggers to recap their week of reading and share their plans for the next reading adventures they will take. Visit the host blogs for a list of great blogs participating in this meme and a whole bunch of titles to add to your to-read lists.
Books I Finished This Week:
I really enjoyed Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue. The entire Origami Yoda series is so much fun. The rebel alliance continues to make waves in this book. I highly recommend the series.
I definitely will recommend the Infinity Ring series to my students (especially any students who really liked The 39 Clues series). The adventures remind me somewhat of The Magic Tree House, because they are traveling through history to fix some anomalies. It is science fiction because the world of the protagonists is vastly different from ours because of the anomalies in historical events. These are fast-paced books and I enjoy reading them.
Middleworld by Jon Voelkel is the first book in the Jaguar Stones series. It is an adventure book about Maya artifacts and temples. This book reminded me of City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende. The american kid,who is completely in love with the materialistic society, ends up in the middle of nowhere and scrambling to stay alive. There is some magic that happens and he ends up believing in some of the legends. This book would be a good one for fans of Rick Riordan. I highly recommend this book and will be looking for the other books in the series.
Crafting Digital Writing by Troy Hicks is brimming with excellent ideas and resources for teachers to do more digital writing in their workshops. I really liked the ideas in this book and it really got me thinking about how to incorporate technology into our every day lives in the classroom. I already have my students blogging, but this book brought so many more ideas. I was especially interested in the idea of creating more audio texts. I am going to look for his first book The Digital Writing Workshop as well.
Books I am Currently Reading:
I am reading El misterio de la cripta embrujada by Eduardo Mendoza. I also picked up two books about writing to inspire me. I am reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and Escaping into the Open by Elizabeth Berg. I also started Gulp! by Mary Roach and a memoir of a man who went back to his summer camp for one last summer working there before he got married. I also started re-reading Reading in the Wild. It is because of this scattered reading that I did not finish much last week.
What’s Next?
My goal this week is to continue with the books I have already started. I will most likely grab some middle grade titles to go along with these books as well. I will also continue to write more.
Blog Posts from this week:
What are you reading this week? I would love to hear from you in the comments!
I still haven't read any of the Origami Yoda series although I have the 1st two-argh-too many on the list. Thanks for sharing about the other series, will note them for those kids who enjoy that kind of book.
Great suggestions! My students love Origami Yoda, so I will have to finish out the series. The Infinity Ring sounds interesting, especially as you compared it to both 39 Clues and Magic Tree House. Reading-wise, where would you place it between those two in terms of reading level and accessibility? Would love to find a series that bridges that gap!
Have you read any of Natalie Goldberg's writing books (esp Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind)? Or Georgia Heard's Writing Towards Home? They're my absolute favorite writing books. I love Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, but for some reason, it doesn't actually get me writing, but Goldberg and Heard always do! Really appreciate your review of Crafting Digital Writing. I think I need to reread that one–skimmed it when it first came out–because I'd like to get my students doing work with audio texts too.