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#blogbookaday: Also an Octopus
Summary: “It begins with an octopus who plays the ukulele. Since this is a story, the octopus has to want something—maybe to travel to faraway galaxies in a totally awesome purple spaceship. Then the octopus sets out to build a spaceship out of soda cans, glue, umbrellas, glitter, and waffles. OK, maybe the octopus needs…
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#blogbookaday: Elmore
Summary: “Elmore is a porcupine desperate to make friends. But it is hard to seek closeness with others when you’re covered with spikes that shoot off your back every so often. Elmore suffers rejection and heartbreak, but the goodness of his forest community ultimately shines through as the animals find a…
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Picture Book Month: Reading and Writing
What better book to explore when taking about reading and writing than a picture book biography about the man who created the thesaurus that we know and love today. Roget liked words and he liked writing lists, so he combined these two loves and published his first book of word…
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5 Early Literacy Practices: WRITE
Writing is the most difficult early literacy practice for me to wrap my head around, but after learning more about it, it’s not as hard as you think it would be! Writing begins with scribbling – children learn what happens when you press a crayon, marker, pencil onto paper. A…
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It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 8/24/15
I don’t know what happened this week, but I got very little reading accomplished. I was expecting to read a lot on Monday (I had the day off) but instead ended up at a pop-up concert with Stevie Wonder in Philadelphia. It was a lot of fun, very hot, and…
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Mythology for Grades K – 2 and 3 -4
Today I did a very quick program for children entering Kindergarten – 2nd grade in the fall. I read aloud “Bellerophon and the Flying Horse” and “Theseus and the Minotaur” in Usborne Greek Myths for Young Children by Heather Amery. This group of myths are written for younger children and are…
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I LOVE my Job!
The other day I received a piece of mail from a friend who is also a Kindergarten teacher. Her students have been learning about community helpers and a little girl in her class wanted to send a librarian a letter and this is what I received: First off, I was…
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Story Time Theme: Writing
This week we chose to focus on Writing as an early literacy skill in story time. In both of my classes, the kids were bouncing off the walls and the stories didn’t go as well as I had hoped, but we definitely had fun dancing to Stop & Go by…
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“Ten Best Sentences”
The American Scholar posted their list of the 10 Best Sentences ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Charles Dickens and while all are very interesting and debatably the best, I would love to see a similar list for children’s literature. What would be on it? Most likely something from Dr.…