Mrs. Lima's First Grade Class Honors Jerry Pinkney

Room 102's Display Board

Betsy Byars

Here is the book that inspired this post. The "Skyscrapers" are reading and discussing it in Miss Heidi's Readers and Writers Workshop. The charm and brilliance of this little book makes it a classic. Have you read it? These characters will stay with me forever.

Also recommended, the author's memoir "The Moon and I". Byars says "The truth is that I love to type title pages. I type them all the time. It makes me feel so good, so full of hope that I type many, many more title pages than I could ever use. When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book!"

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Betsy Cromer Byars is an American author of children's books. Her novel Summer of the Swans won the 1971 Newbery Medal. She was born August 7, 1928  - she just turned 87! Her first children’s book was published in 1962, after it had been rejected nine times. Since then, Byars has won the Newbery Award and the National Book Award and has received glowing reviews for her many novels and picture books. Kirkus Reviews has called Byars “a master of perfectly chosen incident and phrase.” And The New York Times Book Review noted, “Byars has the uncanny ability to know the secret lives, the outward postures, and the exact words her characters would surely use.” Today, Byars’s books continue to be favorites with children both in the U.S. and abroad, and they appear on numerous state reading lists.

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The Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett

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Three children have been sent to live in the countryside, safe from the war in London. When they find two boys hiding in a castle, the past and future come together to make an extraordinary adventure. A hauntingly beautiful story from one of Australia's most acclaimed writers for adults and children.

Sonya Hartnett's work has won numerous Australian and international literary prizes and has been published around the world. Uniquely, she is acclaimed for her stories for adults, young adults and children. Her accolades include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Of A Boy), The Age Book of the Year (Of A Boy), the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize (Thursday's Child), the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for both Older and Younger Readers (Forest, The Silver Donkey, The Ghost's Child, The Midnight Zoo and The Children of the King), the Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Surrender), shortlistings for the Miles Franklin Award (for both Of a Boy and Butterfly) and the CILP Carnegie Medal (The Midnight Zoo). Hartnett is also the first Australian recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2008). In 2014, Hartnett published a new novel for adults, Golden Boys, and her third picture book, The Wild One.

This is what the record looks like for The Children of the King in the Loring Catalog. 
If you click on the picture you will be able to see the 
Subject Headings and Publication Information.

Naomi Shihab Nye

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye 

Scary Tales by James Preller

Illustrations by Iacopo Bruno

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In I Scream, You Scream, PRELLER invites us to "Enter the world of Samantha Carver, an ordinary kid who loves amusement parks, the smell of popcorn, and the terror of a heart-pounding ride. Sam’s got a ticket in her pocket for a very special ride. This ticket will send Sam and her new friend, Andy, on a most unusual adventure — and leave them screaming for their lives. So come along, take a seat. Buckle up, nice and tight. It’s sure to be a bumpy ride."

Read more about Scary Tales Series here.

Here's what readers say about Scary Tales books:

“Finally, thrillers for younger readers! SCARY TALES is a wonderfully creepy introduction to a gripping, ghostly genre” — Patty Norman, Copperfield’s Books.

“We need more scary stories for young kids. This series looks PERFECT!” –Franki Sibberson, teacher, Dublin City Schools, Ohio.

“This little page-turner could become a campfire classic!” — Cybils.

“The thrills and chills are delightfully spine-tingling in this truly terrifying tale. A great choice for reluctant readers.” – School Library Journal.

The author, James Preller, says this about his Scary Tales: 

"Writing “scary” has been liberating. A blast. In the past, I’ve mostly written realistic fiction. But for these stories I’ve tapped into a different sort of imagination, what I think of as theunpossible. The trick is that once you accept that one impossible element—a zombie or a ghost in the mirror—then the story plays out in a straightforward manner.

All storytelling has its backbone in realistic fiction. So many kids, even at a surprisingly young age, are eager to read scary stories. I tried to fill that gap. “Scary” thrills them. It makes their hearts beat faster. Yet I say to students, “I’m sorry, but nobody gets murdered in these books. There are no heads chopped off. No gore.” To me, the great sentence is: The door knob slowly, slowly turned. That delicious moment of anticipation, of danger climbing the stairs. I’ve tried to provide those chills, while still resolving each book in a safe way."

Kirkus Reviews interviewed James Preller!  Read that article here.

Young James Preller

Preller is the youngest of seven children, and has two older sisters and four older brothers. He grew up in Wantagh, New York.  Preller made up stories when he was young and sold them to friends, family, and neighbors. At that time, however, he planned to become a baseball player for the New York Mets.He went to college in Oneonta, New York. After graduating from college in 1983, he worked as a waiter for one year before being hired as a copywriter by Scholastic Corporation. "Meeting" many notable children's writers through their books, he was inspired to try writing himself. His first book, MAXX TRAX: Avalanche Rescue, was published in 1986. Since then Preller has written a variety of books, some under pen names including Mitzy Kafka, James Patrick, and Izzy Bonkers. James Preller is the author of over 80 books for children. He lives in Delmar, New York, with his wife Lisa and their three children, Nicholas, Gavin, and Maggie.

James Preller

Wake Me in Spring, Scholastic, 1994 Hiccups for Elephant, Scholastic, 1995 Ghost Cat and Other Spooky Tales, Scholastic, 2007 Along Came Spider, Scholastic, 2008 Six Innings, Square Fish, 2008 Bystander, Square Fish, 2009 Mighty Casey, Feiwel & Friends, 2009 Justin Fisher Declares War!, Scholastic, 2010 A Pirate's Guide to First Grade, Feiwel & Friends, 2010 Before You Go, Feiwel & Friends, 2012 A Pirate's Guide to Recess, Feiwel & Friends, 2013 Jigsaw Jones Series (32 books!)  Scary Tales Home Sweet Horror, 2013 I Scream, You Scream!, 2013 Good Night, Zombie, 2013 Nightmareland, 2014 One-Eyed Doll, 2014

Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel, Age 7

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I Was A Second Grade Werewolf

In Daniel Manus Pinkwater's books you'll meet fat men from outer space, music-making lizards, a 200-pound chicken and other wonderfully crazy characters. While Pinkwater's books are outrageously humorous, he also has the uncanny ability to reach young readers by writing about his own childhood experiences. 

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I (Miss Nancy) read this one a few days before Halloween -- I agree with the reviewers quoted below!

"No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music...made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird — they taught me to woo the muse of the odd and made me the happy adult I am today.  The NYRB edition of Lizard Music is a beautiful... hardcover, a testament to Pinkwater's influence on generations of readers. It's one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever."  —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“Lizard Music is. . . funny, properly paranoid, shot through with bad puns and sweet absurdities, and all about a baffled kid intent on tracking reality (as slippery as lizards) in a media-spooked milieu.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Wildly imaginative. . . . This is a natural high.” —Booklist (starred review)

Introducing Polly Horvath, Author

Polly Horvath grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She went to college at the Canadian College of Dance in Toronto, studying with the Royal Academy of Dance and later becoming an R.A.D. teacher.

After graduation, she lived in New York City and Montreal before settling  in Metchosin, British Columbia, with her husband, Arnie Keller, and their two daughters, Emily and Rebecca. They have a dog, Andrew, and a horse, Zayda. They live on a hilltop with an assortment of deer, rabbits, two ducks who visit their pond daily—and the occasional cougar and bear.

Polly Horvath has written many books for children that have won awards in both the United States and Canada including a Newbery Honor, National Book Award, the Toronto-Dominion Canadian Children's Award, and The Vicky Metcalf award for her body of work. Her books have been picks of both Rosie O'Donnell and Oprah and have been translated into over twenty five languages.

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This week I read One Year in Coal Harbor. Loring Library has several books by Polly Horvath including Northward to the Moon, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny -- Detectives Extrordinaire!, My One Hundred Adventures, and Everything on a Waffle.