3321 M&W Author Profile: Mary Ann Hoberman

Mary Ann Hoberman is a wonderful children’s author who writes books and poems. She was born on August 12, 1930, and says that since she was a little girl she knew that she wanted to write and be an author. Some of her more famous books include the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You series. These books are fun stories to read any time, but especially for one on one reading like at bedtime. You can take turns with the child, you read one page, and they read the next. There are four books in this series, all which are delightful! I really did enjoy her website http://www.maryannhoberman.com. There you can easily find all of her books she has written, her poems, a biography, and other links. I really like how the book section is put together; it is a picture of the cover page of all of her books. This makes it especially easy to remember the book whenever you go to the bookstore! I remember seeing so many of her books at Barnes and Nobles whenever I was there last :)

3321 M&W Author Profile: Frog and Toad Are Friends

This week’s author profile is on the book Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel. This is such a great book for children ages 4-8 and is about the two wonderful friends who are great role models for children. The duo goes on all sorts of adventures together through out the five stories and they experience many embarrassing things. Things like being seen in your bathing suit (we all were embarrassed when this would happen to us), looking for lost buttons, waiting for mail, and waking up after hibernation. Children will be able to relate to these stories with friendships of their own and experiences that they have been through with their friends. A really cool website that I found, http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/frog/frogtg.html, has all sorts of activities and lessons that go along with the book. There are activities such as making an origami frog, activities about friends, and children will make their own description of what a frog looks like. It’s a good resource for teachers to use and tweak to make their own!

3321 M&W Author Profile: Mercer Mayer

Mercer Mayer has published over 300 children’s books, which he not only writes but illustrates as well. He is best known for the Little Critter books that he writes and illustrates, and these are books that I absolutely loved as a child! They are so much fun! On his website I read that most of the books he writes are about things that happened to him whenever he was a kid, and also about things that happen to his children now that he is grown up. The little critter books are about a family of critters, there are Little Critter, his mom and dad and little sister and little brother. My personal favorite book of the series is Merry Christmas Mom and Dad. In this book, Little Critter gets ready for Christmas and is very excited about being a good helper. He tries to do all sorts of things like help wrap the presents, buy presents for his parents, and hang up Christmas lights. But even though he means well, he ends up getting overwhelmed and tangled up in everything. It’s a very funny book, and great for around Christmas time.
The Mercer Mayer website that I liked the best is http://www.littlecritter.com. Here there are interactive games, an art gallery, coloring pages, sing-a-longs, and interactive read and plays. Children will love this website!

3321 Group 2 Presentation 11/30: Pink and Say

The second group to present today did their presentation using the book Pink and Say. This story was definitely a tearjerker, but it was such a wonderful tale of the courage and friendship between the two characters. This would definitely be a great book to use with older kids, middle school for sure, whenever studying the Civil War. I loved how the group members each took turns reading different sections of the story; it made it easier to pay attention since everybody did it a little different. I also enjoyed the activity that we did, and it they had us write about the character Pink in a creative way. They did a great job!

3321 M&W Author Profile: Lois Lowry

The author that I am writing about today is Lois Lowry. A book that she is very well known for is Number the Stars, and is the tale of a young little girl who lives in Denmark in 1943 during World War II. The young girl, Annemarie Johansen, has to courageously help her family smuggle the Jewish out of Denmark, and amongst these is her best friend, Ellen Rosen. This book shows us how even in a time of war and terror there is still a sense of pride that we all have, as well as human decency. This story obviously isn’t for young children, but it is a great book to have in your classroom for the older classes.
This author’s website is http://www.lowry.com and has a lot of neat things contained in it. Her biography of course can be found there, along with descriptions of her books, and speeches. You should go take a look!

3321 M&W Group Presentations 11/30: The Empty Pot

This group did their genre presentation over the Chinese folktale The Empty Pot and how that book tied in with integrity. I especially enjoyed how they had the book projected up on the screen so that we were able to all see the detailed illustrations. It was a nice change from your usual read aloud. I thought that it was great how they took the time to do a book walk before reading the story; this gave us time to take a look at the beautiful illustrations, and would have been a great way to get the children interested in the story if this was in a real classroom. I enjoyed how the activity that the group gave us to do; the worksheet with the empty pot and we wrote our definition of integrity in it and shared with the class. I think that this is an activity that students would have enjoyed doing. They did a great job!

3321 M&W 11/25 Presentations and Author Profile on Marcia Thornton Jones

I was absent and missed the first day of presentations, but I did hear that the groups did a fantastic job. I was told that there was a skit acted out with masks and all, and my fellow group members were a little scared after seeing this presentation. That means they did a great job!

For my author profile this week, I am focusing on Marcia Thornton Jones. She is a best selling children’s author and has over 126 books published! She is best known for the Adventures of the Bailey School Kids series. This series is made up of over 80 books, and children just love to read them (I know I did whenever I was a child). In each of the books the Bailey School Kids encounter a seemingly innocent character, like their teacher or school custodian, who might be a mythical character like a vampire or ghost! Children will read this and the whole time be wondering if the character really is mythical or not, and of course finds out at the end.
These chapter books are fun for 5th graders, and there are now the Bailey School Kids “Jr.” chapter books series for 2nd to 4th graders. The URL to her wonderful website is http://www.marciatjones.com/

3321 M&W Author Profile: Tomie Depaola

For this author profile I decided to focus on Tomie Depaola since the read aloud video was on one of his books. Tomie Depaola is a well known children’s author who had been published for over forty years and not only writes but illustrates as well. All in all he has written and illustrated over 200 books in his time and is still giving us more. His works have been recognized with numerous awards including the Newbery Honor Award and the Caldecott Honor Award.
Probably his most famous book is titled Strega Nona, a book that he illustrated himself as well. It is about an elderly lady who always helps out the people of her village by doing things like curing headaches, getting rid of warts, and helping single ladies find husbands. She needs help doing some chores, so Big Anthony comes to help her do them. She warns him not to touch her magic pasta pot, but he doesn’t listen and whenever she is away he uses it to serve pasta to the community. He doesn’t know how to turn it off, so the whole town ends up getting flooded with pasta, and as a punishment he must eat all that pasta. It is a very cute book!
The website that I found is his official website and the URL is http://www.tomie.com. There is a biography about Tomie, his artwork, his stories, and information on being an artist. It’s very interesting and you should check it out!

332 M&W Reply to Good Read Aloud Video

This teacher performing the read aloud did a wonderful job! I loved how she reminded her students of the text-to-text connections before she began the book, this way they could be thinking of them while she is reading. Something else I really liked was how she obviously has taught her students about the different parts of the book and she asked them what the dedication page was and they raised their hands and knew right away. She did a great job of keeping the book and illustrations in view of her students, and didn’t read the book to herself and then show them the pictures after she read the page (I’ve seen this many times). The one thing that I know you told us never to do when reading to our students was sit above them and that is what she is doing. She isn’t eye level with them, and she could have sat on the floor with them. She did a great job of explaining what the Italian words were to her students, and didn’t just ignore it and assume that they knew what the word meant. I loved how she interacted with her students throughout the book, this was a great way of keeping them engaged and interested in the story. This video was a great example of how to conduct a proper read aloud and I am glad I was exposed to it. Thanks :)

3321 Author Profile: Hans Christian Anderson

The author that I decided to speak about this week is Hans Christian Andersen. This Danish author wrote classic children’s stories and poems. He is an oldie, born April 2, 1805 and died August 4, 1875, but definitely a goody! Some of his most famous fairy tales include “The Little Mermaid”, “Thumbelina”, and “The Ugly Duckling” just to name a few. His stories are readily available to us and can go well in the classroom especially since many have been made into motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films and they have been translated into 150 + languages! A great gook that I found is called Hans Christian Anderson: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories and it is an accumulation of all of his works into one book. Due to the fact that he has written so many pieces, it is over 1,000 pages but I think that it would be a great piece for a teacher to have that could be used for read alouds and story time. You can purchase it for only $16.32 off of Amazon! Here is a cool website that I found on Hans Christian Anderson http://hca.gilead.org.il/ and it has all sorts of information varying from his life, to detailed information on his works and links to the actual stories. It was pretty neat and could be used for all sorts of things!

3321 M&W Guided Reading Websites

A great website that I found that was great for guided reading resources is called www.readinga-z.com. They had quite a large amount of options that you can choose from, and there were literally thousands of books, lesson plans, worksheets, assessments, etc that you could print off right from your own computer. But there was a BIG problem that I did not really like in this website…you had to pay to access this information; $59.95-$84.95 per class for one year! This was a major turn off so I went and found a different website :) but I did decide to blog about it anyways in case any of you are willing to spend that type of money!

So the next website that I came across was absolutely amazing! It is called roythezebra.com and I tried out some of the different links on there and had so much fun, children would definitely enjoy this website. It is an interactive reading website for emerging readers and there are interactive reading games (that are actually fun :0), guided reading stories, literacy worksheets, and songs. And these are only the free things that this website has to offer. They have a reading store that you can purchase reading software off of. The reason I enjoyed this website so much was because this would be something that children can do not only at school but at home as well to help their reading skills. And it is fun so they will be excited about learning! You should really go check it out the URL is http://www.roythezebra.com.