My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hey, Newbery Committee!! Can you hear me now? THIS IS FREAKIN’ AMAZING!!!

I loved When You Reach Me, the author’s last Newbery Award winner, so I had high expectations. Stead blasted right through the roof. I love genre-defying books–this is a bit of a thriller, and a bit of a mystery. Stead obviously knows her Man from U.N.C.L.E., and she’s put in as many stunning twists as Sixth Sense. There are elements of a family story, a friendship story, a school story, too. It’s a rich read.

This is the story of Georges (the S is silent), who is glumly getting used to a new apartment, his parents’ schedules, the recent defection of a friend to the “cool table,” and the cheerfully bizarre family who lives in the same building. Middle School is a trial, complete with bullies, clueless teachers, and pointless tasks. But the boy who lives upstairs has all kinds of secrets–and he has plans for Georges.

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High adventure awaits in this Shakespearean tale of missing heirs, evil magicians, and a Bluebeard-style wicked ruler. The author’s gleeful embracement of the conspicuously awful (torture chambers, descriptions of rotting corpses, and being buried alive…) reminded me of the more gruesome Grimm tales, with a bit of Lemony Snicket thrown in. I, personally, loved the various objects the over-the-top Necromancer used for eyeballs in his loathsome empty sockets. I was hoping for a bit more character development. The heroine and hero seemed little changed by their adventures. I also thought the heroine’s love of puppetry was going to be put to more significant use.

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This was an absolutely fascinating read for the summer of 2012. Loewen examines a dozen or so American history textbooks for accuracy, and finds a lot of evasions, half-truths, misconceptions, lies, damned lies, and statistics. The story of the American nation, as we teach it to our children, is slanted to a nationalistic, Eurocentric, self-righteous angle. To protect our kids from unpleasant stories, we whitewash historical events. To avoid annoying vocal political groups, we soften stories to remove elements of racism, sexism, and greed. To inspire our children, we present our national heroes as perfect, unblemished souls–worthy, but impossible to emulate. Loewen makes the argument that by hiding controversy and teaching history three times removed from primary sources, we rob our children of the truth, and of the opportunity to think critically about forces in our nation today.

Do pick up this book. While you read, keep your Twitter stream open on the left, and follow all the conversations about the Common Core Standards and teacher evaluations. Check the newspaper and news websites for stories on teacher proficiency, and remember that all these poor saps who want to pay their mortgages are going to have to teach to whatever test will determine their teaching “quality.” The content of the test is going to drive what’s in the textbooks. And what’s in the textbooks will drive what Ms. Jones or Mr. Smith is teaching. Most likely, the test, the textbook, teacher licensure, and the professional development the teacher receives are coming from big companies like Pearson. Even if teachers and school boards want students to have a more realistic understanding of American history, the odds are against them.

In those news items, watch for the insidious presence of corporate backers, union bashers, and conservative politicians who want want to tell history “the right way.” And remember that Texas–the state with the GOP platform that proclaims critical thinking is dangerous because it might lead children to question entrenched beliefs–is pretty much the most important force in textbook approval in the nation.

Then ask yourself if anything is going to change.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brilliant! Text and illustrations are perfectly paired in this funny, sassy, warm story of two friends visiting the state fair.

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One of my favorite science apps is Creatures of Light, a free app from the American Museum of Natural History. App users can explore the biology of bioluminescent creatures of land and sea, in a well-designed app that features photos, interactive maps and diagrams, and embedded videos. I even like the background music.

Another nice little app is Painting with Time, $.99 from Red Hill Studios. Children can use a palette of art tools to “paint” changes over time. For example, a child might choose a black and white photo of a forest. Using the painting tools, she can paint one slice of the picture with “spring,” another with “summer” and so on, until she has a layered painting showing aspects of all seasons. Other choices include how a city changes in the course of a day, how a woman’s face changes with age, or the changes in a mountain scene as a glacier retreats. It’s deceptively simple, but the app has a lot to offer. They have another app that explores climate change in a similar fashion.

There are a host of apps now that let the user identify common species of plants, birds, rocks, insects, and many other features of our world. The free iPhone /app WildLab Bird, part of a “citizen science” project, helps users identify birds and record their sightings. Each users’ sightings become part of the data that supports research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  There are lots of teacher resources at the WildLab website, too.

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a tech tool this much since my first Palm handheld. I like the immediacy of posting a photo to Flickr right away, responding to someone on Twitter, or checking for movie listings or store hours on the go. The cell phone functions seem little different from our old Verizon phones, though I’ve been cautioned by more seasoned users that I should’t expect the same coverage when I travel to less-populated areas.

Smartphones like the iPhone are becoming among the best-selling tech tools out there.  If you–like me–have been steadfastly ignoring all that Apple stuff, here’s a little primer. An iPhone is a phone with web access, an integrated camera and voice recorder, with an onscreen keyboard that lets you send an email or surf the web. An iTouch is the same tool, minus the camera and cell phone part– and it needs to connect to the web via a wifi network, instead of the cell phone network. For the foreseeable future, the iPhone is going to remain a tool that teachers buy for themselves but that just happen to be useful for school.  The reason is the contract iPhone users must have with AT&T for access to the cellphone & data network.  Most districts aren’t going to be able to pay for cellphone contracts for their staff. (I wish.) The iTouch is a different kettle of fish, because it can connect to the wifi network many schools already have in place, and because the iTouches don’t require a contract and monthly fee. At about $200, the iTouch is a good substitute–though not perfect–for the less portable, more expensive laptops.  Affordable magic.

Many libraries and classrooms are already using iPods to share podcasts, lectures, photos…a whole host of media.  iTouches can do even more–access the web, make audio recordings, and perform an amazing array of tasks using apps from the App store, which is the way software developers distribute and sell applications (what someone of my generation thinks of as a “computer program”) for the iPhone and iTouch. There are apps that make grocery lists, let you post to your blog, find an NPR broadcast, play a word game, find a recipe, or trackweight loss. Go ahead, diehard techies, laugh…but I had NO CLUE that such a variety of educational applications were available. Storytelling apps. Math game apps.  Music-making and art apps. Apps to help your learn Spanish, post to the class blog or to Twitter, or figure out what constellation you’re looking at.  Many apps are priced at less than $3; many are free.  The two apps from the International Children’s Digital Library are lovely. And free.

Quick example: my first graders have been learning about the various reasons authors write–to persuade, to inform, to entertain.  We were looking at books by NY author Seymour Simon, a great non-fiction writer.  We read his Danger! Earthquakes! (a far more timely topic than I had anticipated!) which explains the Richter scale and how scientists interpret seismograph data to learn about quakes.  The morning of the lesson, I downloaded an app called iSeismo to my phone, which shows a seismograph-type display (little lines going up and down as vibrations shake the phone.)  The vibrations were provided by 12 eager 6 year-olds, who could immediately see what a seismograph recording looked like, and how the intensity of the vibration changed the way the lines jumped up and down.

I spent some time this weekend reading up on the apps other educators are using, and finding what folks are posting on Twitter using the #app4kids hashtag.  More on this later…

That depends.  Does she live in a small village in France, near the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, or in  the mountains of the Czech Republic?  Is it her fairy godmother or Godfather Snake she asks for help?  Cinderella might see the pumpkin patch from which her transformed carriage will come, or she might see a volcano with smoke rising from the top.  The wicked stepmother might keep Cinderella from visiting that castle down the hill, but then again, she might send her stepdaughter out to find violets in the snow.

Young children rarely have any perception that their own culture is not universal.  They assume that everyone dresses the same, eats the same foods, and celebrates the same holidays. Our first graders are working on a project–Cinderella’s Window–that will introduce the kids to the fascinating differences between countries, while understanding that some things–like storytelling–unite people the world over. There are lots of methods–history, world languages, maps, cooking–teachers can use to introduce children to the rich variety of ways people live, but folktales make a nice lens through which kids can begin to examine culture since so many traditional tales have been published in picture book form.

We decided to use Cinderella stories as the focal point for a project that will meet learning standards in Social Studies, English Language Arts, Information Literacy, and Technology. Our stories were drawn from around the world, with versions from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, India, and France. We gathered nonfiction books on each country, and the page I made for our library wiki links to pictures, text, and audiovisual links for our students’ research.  You can see our book list, graphic organizer, and unit outline here.

The children began by hearing Cinderella versions from other cultures, and comparing them to the version most familiar to them (think stepmother, fairy godmother, and glass slipper.)  They are now using pictures, books, and websites to find out more about the countries where the stories were set. In another week, they’ll begin writing a paragraph that tells several facts about the country they’ve researched, and they’ll draw pictures of what a Cinderella character would see through the window.  The project will end with a field trip to the arts center at a local college, to see a play…Cinderella!

I spent some time this afternoon looking at kids’ resources on climate change.  Now, if I have a pet peeve about the publishing world, it’s the continuing lack of quality nonfiction for early elementary kids.  There have been some marvelous strides forward, don’t get me wrong–things have improved greatly in the last ten years.  But I still find myself at purchase order time, swearing under my breath as I scan library periodicals, publisher catalogs and vendor websites trying to find excellent nonfiction for my young students.  Science books in particular are a challenge to find–some authors dumb down material to the point that the material is erroneous or incomprehensible.

So it’s a pleasure to discover some great print resources on climate change for the K-6 crowd.

• Spend some time reading the I.N.K. Blog: Interesting Nonfiction for Kids and you’ll find lots of children’s nonfiction to celebrate.  Marfe Ferguson Delano blogged on INK about her new book, Earth in the Hot Seat: Bulletins from a Warming World (National Geographic, 2009), describing the decisions she made about how she presented the facts of global warming.  The book scored a starred review from SLJ.
• For a younger crowd, there’s the picture book format Polar Bear, Why is Your World Melting? by Robert Wells (Albert Whitman & Company, 2008).  One third grade teacher I know used this book last winter as part of a persuasive letter writing project–kids wrote letters outlining their ideas for cutting back on carbon emissions.
• Another nonfiction picture book: Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? The Dangers of Global Warming, by Anne Rockwell (Harper Collins, 2006.)

Heaven knows there’s a ocean of information on the web about climate change–umm, a rising ocean, thanks to the melting of polar ice.  Here are a few rafts to cling to:

• From the EPA, the Climate Change Kids’ Site
• Recommended books & websites for science teachers from the  NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
• Time for Kids Special Report on Global Warming

Stay cool, y’all.

UPDATE:  I should have mentioned two other website / blogs:  Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears:  An Online Magazine for K-5 Teachers and Meltfactor.org, the blog of Ohio State professor Jason Box.  I also just picked up the children’s picture book, Once I Was a Cardboard Box…But Now I’m a Book about Polar Bears! by Anton Poitier.  It just happened to be in the Scholastic Book Fair we’re hosting.  It’s a cute concept–the book is printed on paper made from…well, a recycled cardboard box.  The text has two “stories” side-by-side: the story of the life and threatened extinction of the polar bear, and the recycling of the paper on which the book is printed.

The official Blog Action Day count was 13,398 blogs from 155 countries.

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