Monday Reading, Plus SOLC 6/31

SOLC #6/31 - 

      I'm slicing with the Two Writing Teachers community for Day Six of Thirty-One of the Slice of Life Challenge in March.  Thank you, Stacey, Beth, Deb, Betsy, Lanny, Kathleen, Lisa, and Melanie.  
           On Mondays, I connect with a group that reviews books they want to share. I love learning about others' favorite books, adding to my own TBR list. I discover books I wouldn't otherwise on this day.

          Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who link up.  #IMWAYR

          Three beautiful books, three books showing how different people live. In my teaching life, and my personal reading life, I make connections and wanted my students to make them too. Sometimes they don't realize that book stories contain universal themes, topics and ideas that bind humans together. Here are three books that can help make those connections.

         by Deborah Freedman - New this year, and it’s a marvelous one. It’s just right for showing what a home is, starting with “this door was once a colossal oak tree/about three hugs around/and as high as the blue”. There is more about the source of the stone, the bricks, and the roof until a sweet cat and a young child reading under the stairs inhabit “This House”. It’s a beautifully wrought invitation that asks about one’s own house, too. Illustrations explore the words in soft colors that move through the seasons until spring, declaring that the house remembers, too.

         I remember houses in my growing up, and those I lived in with my husband, what we did to make them special for us. Here is one. We bought a house lakeside once, that had started out as a small cabin, that "inner room with a fireplace." The part I know about this house, ONCE was that the people who built it used stones from the lake's edge to build the floor to ceiling fireplace. It was gorgeous. By the time we moved there, the inner part was surrounded by bedrooms and baths, two porches and a kitchen. We added a deck and a new dock for our boat. Lake living was our home, once.

by Kate Hoefler and Jonathan Bean

          A picture book illustrated by Jonathan Bean’s interesting colorful cut-outs and collages is always entertaining, and this time Kate Hoefler defines cowboys (who can also be cowgirls) in the most loving of ways. They are strong, patient, kind. They sing to calm the cattle, and keep away the loneliness. It’s a tough job to be away from home so long and to take constant care of the herd. I think there might be acres of conversation when reading this book to a class. I loved that the story shows so many layers of a cowboy’s life. And I wonder if there is a short YouTube that might add to the realism this book implies.

          

by Tomson Highway & Julie Flett

           This is a book that is an unexpected story about a family that lives far in the north, written and illustrated by award-winning artists who are Canadian. The unexpected is that it is told in both English and Cree, the family's language. There is only this family who live in a tent on different lakes during the summer. While the parents fish, two brothers play. They create their own toys like dolls from sticks and imagine stories with them. A number of animals become their pets as the babies grow up--loons, squirrels, even baby eagles are included as some of their play. But the biggest fun is when they tie tiny threads to the bodies of dragonflies and run with them as kites. As a part of the magic, the book ends with the boys' dreams, flying high off the ground with those "dragonfly kites". Illustrations amaze with the creation of simple cut-outs that show the beauty of the outdoors and the boys' play.

Still Reading: A long adult book for my book club.

Next: I have several arcs that are soon due to publish, so must read them first, then Emerson's Last Day on Mars.