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.

3321 M&W Nonfiction

This week we learned all about the nonfiction genre of literature. I have got to say, I look at nonfiction in a completely different light now. Yes, I am one of those people who has always immediately categorized anything that is nonfiction as boring. I know that this is completely wrong, but before this class I always thought of nonfiction as things like our history text book (gag!) and I don't have any good memories concerning my old history text books!

I loved the examples that our professor brought to class! It especially interested me whenever we talked about The Magic School Bus. I was OBSESSED with The Magic School Bus growing up; I had every single book and never missed an episode of the show! I never actually stopped to think "hmm, is this fiction or nonfiction"? Without thinking it through the first thing that I want to answer is fiction, because "fiction is fake" and since it is a cartoon I don't automatically think of it as real. But the things that these books and television episodes teach are scientific facts and children really learn a lot from them. I suppose this is where the "faction" category comes in, and I think that it is quite a catchy word that is very much common sense. It is perfect for teaching children about important things, and the small fiction or cartoon (I'm not saying they're the same thing) portion is what draws children in.

After reading and discussing chapter 9 I'm no longer afraid of being bored with nonfiction books. I definately want to have a lot of nonfiction books in my classroom, and I thought that the nonfiction/fiction scavenger hunt was a great idea; especially to introduce children to the nonfiction genre and break those horrible stereotypes. I plan on using that activity for sure in my future classroom!

3344 MGP Expository Piece

My topic for my MGP is pets! My narrative is a story about a dog who finds her perfect family, and my persuasive piece is about trying to convince my students and their parents to adopt a pet. For my expository piece I was going to do a "how to play fetch with your dog". I had a couple of ideas like "how to give your dog a bath", "how to feed your pet", and "how to take your dog on a walk" but I thought that "how to play fetch with your dog" would be the best to do. It is simple enough for first graders, and I have to keep it to just a couple of steps so it shouldn't be that difficult.

What I plan on doing is making some sort of visual (I haven't quite decided which kind yet) and have pictures of me actually doing the steps with my dog. Of course, first I thought of doing a poster board but that is way too generic and I want something different and creative. I've thought about making a video that actually shows me going through the steps of playing fetch with my dog, but I'm not sure if I'm good enough with technology to accomplish that! I would love to hear from ya'll to see if you might have any other ideas as far as which format I could use : )

3344: Stiletto Stoners

Since Dr. Harris wasn't in class on Wednesday, Mrs. Pickett told us to blog about the "Stiletto Stoner" article and how we feel about it. Personally, after going online and reading the whole article myself it was written in a light that made it okay that these women were going home every evening and getting baked. Then you scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the reply's and it's all these women saying things like "we need more women like this in control" or talk about how they are only 22, 23, etc. and saying that they are "successful" and smoke weed every night (hahaha....successful to them was $20,000/year). As an educator, this article was telling all of the children who read it that it is okay to be a stoner and if you smoke weed that you will be successful and empowered like these women. That is not the right message to send to our children! We spend a whole week, "Red Ribbon Week" talking to children about staying away from drugs, and "just say no" and have programs like the D.A.R.E. program and this article is going against all of this. I personally look at the Marie Claire magazine in a completely different light, and I don't plan on purchasing their magazine any time in the future. It's funny how much one article can change a person's mind about a particular product.