I’m consolidating.

If you want to read more of what I have to say about books for kids, please go to my new blog/website: adriennebashista.net

Is that you are Zeus for Halloween.

This was an amazingly easy costume to make, which from my perspective (the mother and chief seamstress) was key.

Outfit includes 1 toga (instructions and helpful video for tying a toga found on youtube) made from a white sheet putchased at the thriftshop for $2; a wire crown gussied up with some gold leaves purchased at a crafts store; and a gold belt made from a scrap of gold fabric I had lying around. Shoes were this summer’s sporty sandals - they still fit him or else I’d have spray-painted them gold.

We also made a lightning bolt out of cardboard and tin foil. This was shoved into the plastic pumpkin after a minute of use. Good thing it was bendable!

His other idea was to be Poseidon as depicted in the Percy Jackson books, which would’ve involved bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and sandals. Maybe a shell necklace or something. But he worried that no one would get it.

No one really got the Zeus outfit, actually. Every other kid we went trick-or-treating with was dressed as a vampire.

I don’t know if we had H1N1 or not, but the week before last LittleJ (my 7 year old) was out for 2 days with something virusy-flu-like, and feverish, and last week BigJ (my 10-year-old) was out 3 days with the same.

Me, I had a little fever, too…but I went on in to school. I can’t be out 5 days in 2 weeks with my kids and let a little old fever stop me.

When my kids are sick I relax the screen-viewing rules. Normally the rule is this: no screen time (meaining TV or non-school use computer) on school days, screentime on weekends only after rooms are cleaned to momma’s specifications, and limited screentime on those days. Like not all day. Not even all morning.

But when a sick, feverish, headachy little boy is home for the day then I allow unlimited screen time while brother is off at school. Sometimes it’s part of the cure. Zoning and dozing in front of the TV for a day or two is fine in this situation.

But the boys surprised me. Sure, there was plenty of TV watching. But there was also plenty of reading. BigJ reread The Last Olympian twice (perhaps his 5th and 6th readings of these books?), and started D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths for the third time. He also got a ways into the relevant section of Bulfinches before he became frustrated with the Roman names for the Gods. And his 3rd day of being sick, when he wasn’t sick at all (we were obeying the 24-hour fever free rule of school), he read the most recent Cressida Cowell Hiccup Horrendous Haddock book as well as Syren, the most recent Septimus Heap.

Yes, the kid can read.

Now, LittleJ is in 1st grade and just jumping on the read-to-himself bandwagon, but he is certainly very text aware and he looks at books all the time. He especially looks at graphic novels - mostly his brother’s. He has memorized every picture in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, loves his Scooby Doo and Batman graphic novels/picture books - really more the length and size of chapter books, but not comics - it’s hard to categorize exactly what these are. His interest match up exactly with the interests of many of the 6-9 year old boys at the school in which I work - most of whom are both emergent readers and English Language Learners. It convinces me that we need LOTS and LOTS of this kind of text in our library…but I digress. The long and the short of it is that LittleJ also spent a lot of his sick time looking at books. Lots more than I’d have thought for a very early reader. I read one or two to him, but that wasn’t what he was interested in. He was making sense of the books by himself.

I am convinced that the reading was what cured us of our flu so quickly. And me? I was cured by the happy little readers at school…and at home.

It’s strange to me that out of all the blogs I write (this is number 3, soon to be #4), that THIS one is the most neglected. THIS one is about the subject closest to my heart: children’s books and writing. And THIS one is the one most related to what I do every single day of my workweek - with joy - celebrate books and reading.

Can I promise to really write about a book a day? Probably not. I certainly still read at least a book a day - several with my students, several with my children, and bits and parts of others if I can find the time. This weekend I skimmed about 12 different ghost story books for a project I’m working on, and I finished reading Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child, and I’m halfway through Fearless, by Tim Lott.

Here’s what’s on my to-read pile right now:

Impossible, Nancy Werlin

The Lifelong Activist, Hillary Rettig

Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin

Time Management from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern

Star of the Week, Darlene Friedman

It’s Being Done, Karin Chenoweth

Readicide, Kelly Gallagher

Born Digital, John Palfry and Urs Gasser

And I have another to-read pile in my bedroom, but it’s early in the morning and I don’t want to wake up my husband by turning on the light!

So, reading’s getting done. Pretty eclectic reading, at that. At school we’ve just read My Librarian Won’t Tell Us Anything, by Toni Buzzeo, and we’re also reading My Librarian is a Camel, by Margriet Ruurs. Both Toni Buzzeo and Margriet Ruurs are library/writer/reader/book heroes of mine.

What about you? What’s on your to-read pile?

When I was a little girl my mom and dad read to me all the time. They also read books for pleasure themselves, as well as magazines and newspapers and the backs of cereal boxes. Once I could read, I read books. I had lots of books, we went to the library all the time, and I was praised for reading. Bedtime always involved a story - either from a book or from my mom and dad’s memory. My dad, in particular, was great at bedtime stories and I learned all the Greek myths before I was 6 years old from his night-time re-tells.

I was little in the 70s and I don’t remember ever having cable, if it even existed, and we got 3 channels in most of the places we lived if we were lucky. So - lots of books, no TV, and obviously, no video games or computers (because I’m too old for that), and people who modeled that reading was an activity better than pretty much anything else you could do.

That’s how to raise a reader! I’m a professional in the book industry (writer, publisher, and librarian) but I’m also a mom who is raising 2 readers of her own. Both my boys have access to stuff I didn’t have - computers, video games, and way more channels on TV than a person could ever need - but we limit their access to screens and we never limit their access to words. If given the choice, guess which thing they spend more time doing?

You’re right: reading.

My 9 year old son and I just finished reading Crispin: A Cross of Lead, by Avi. I read it to him at bedtime, and I think if you’re going to introduce any 9 year old to this book that is the way to do it. I was able to explain it to him as I read. I doubt most 9-year-olds have the background knowledge of pre-Reformation England to really understand it.

It’s interesting to me that this book won the Newbery award in 2003. There’s been a lot of discussion on the library lists and blogs about the relevance of the Newbery in the past few years and I think this book is a good example of the problems with the award. I’ve read about half of the Newbery award winners (and more than half of the honor books) and in many cases I don’t agree with the selection. Not that I think the choices aren’t deserving, but in many cases I feel the books that were given an honor (as opposed to the top award) are more appealing to kids, faster-moving, and more universal than the actual winner. Now that I’ve read Crispin: The Cross of Lead, I feel the same way about the 2003 winners. I loved both Hoot and The House of the Scorpion and I usually have no problem booktalking either book or suggesting them on the fly to my 4th and 5th graders - but I don’t feel the same way about this book. That’s probably not the only criteria the Newbery folks use to give the awards - but that’s my #1 criteria: can I sell this book to the kids in my library. And this book, for me, is a hard sell. The same goes for the winners of the last few years - I happened to love The Higher Power of Lucky - but how to get my kids to want to read it? And forget Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! My kids lack the background knowledge to understand this book. When I read it, it’ll be out loud to my son.

That said, I did enjoy this book and we were both on the edge of our proverbial seats during the final confrontation. I did have a bit of a hard time buying the character change from Crispin - he got a lot of confidence awfully fast for a kid who didn’t even have a name until the past couple weeks of his life. But I guess that’s the power of love!

Some resources for using Crispin: The Cross of Lead in the classroom:

• A study guide for Crispin: The Cross of Lead
• Video interviewing Avi, from Reading Rockets, where he talks about the struggle of writing - as a writer myself I love what he says about having trouble deciding what to say next a hundred times a day. From such a prolific author this means a lot! He also talks about his dyslexia. This could be really inspirational for kids who struggle with writing. 
• A great page of suggested booktalks for Crispin: The Cross of Lead.

So, apparently you are never supposed to apologize for not writing in your blog. It’s bad blog manners or something. So I’m not saying I’m sorry or anything like that, but people, I have been busy! Work, holidays, my little publishing business, and now the CPSIA.

If you don’t know what it is, go to my other blog and read about it. Or Google it. Or read this in Publisher’s Weekly. Educate yourself. Because if you have anything to do with children’s books - be it writer, publisher, librarian, parent, reader - whatever - you need to know what it is and how astonishingly devastating it will be for the children’s book industry.

“I wish for a change and a friend,” says Little Pig, when he learns these three new words. And just like that, it happens. Simple, easy, wonderful!

Wish, Change, Friend, which is written by Ian Whybrow and illustrated by Tiphanie Beeke (and which seems to be, sadly, out of print) is a brilliant, charmingly illustrated picture book that tells the story of someone - Little Pig - who inspired to get outside of his box. Little Pig lives alone in the forest. He loves to read, and he has all the books and acorns and twigs that he needs. Until one day he finds three words in one of his books: wish, change, and friend.

The next morning, after making his wish for a change and a friend, he wakes up to find that it’s snowed (a change). He makes a snowman, who comes alive (a friend). Little Pig decides he likes these new experiences, and so he and his snow friend take a journey. They meet a penguin, who himself has been reading and who is learning new words: pig and together. Well, what do you know? Pig is there! And he and his snow friend are together with the penguin! They ponder the fantasticness of this, and then decide that together is the best word of all. The end!

I read this book with kindergartners right before the holiday break (winter theme) and I was a tad worried that the book was too existential for them. But it wasn’t. They got it. They really did. Just like Little Pig, they make text to self connections all the time. And if you’re going to believe a talking, reading pig whose snowman comes alive, the coincidence of wandering off and finding a talking, reading penguin who just happens to be learning new vocabulary about YOU makes total sense!

After I read it (twice) we did some really fun collage art, too!

There are some FABULOUS websites out there that you can use to read good quality picture books with kids - completely free! At school, I’ll often use these sites when I want to read a book I might not have in the library, or sometimes I have books about a certain topic in the library but I know the teachers want to use them (like when all of 1st grade is learning about the gingerbread man, for example), or I know kids want the books (like holiday books). I’ll also project books that we have in the library because sometimes it’s just fun to see them really, really big.

I probably use Lookybook the most, since it has a good search engine and the most possibilities, but Storyline will read the book to kids, which is great for a center activity, or for a tired teacher or librarian It also makes the books more like a movie if someone else is reading it, which could make little ears a little more attentive. As a parent, I could see reading from these sites with my child in my lap, and as someone who often tries to get work done at home with my kids running around, I would use these sites as a way to include my child in whatever I was trying to get done on family time.

Here’s a list of sites where you can get full text picture books on-line:

International Children’s Digital Library
Storyline Online
Lookybook
Clifford Stories (English & Spanish)
Kids Corner (Classics)
Lil’ Fingers
Between the Lions
Kids Zone: Myths and Fables from Around the World
Room 108 Kids Stories
Big Universe