Betsy's Day at the Game

Peanuts, Cracker Jack, cotton candy, and hot dogs! Those are my fondest memories of the ball park, and they certainly top my daughters' lists as well. But one equally hallowed tradition of baseball had been fading from the American scene, so I'm glad to see a picture book that's bringing it back.

Betsy's Day at the Game, written by Greg Bancroft and illustrated by Katherine Blackmore, describes a young girl's visit to the ballpark with her grandfather. The book captures all there is to love about baseball, and that's because author Greg Bancroft seems to be a baseball fan first and foremost. His descriptions and Katherine Blackmore's images capture the sights, sounds, smells, and (my favorite part) tastes of the ballpark. Via their narrative, we spend a day vicariously at the park. Simple enough, right?

As the story progresses and the game begins, however, we realize that much more is taking place. Betsy and Grandpa are teaching us, step by step and in plain English, how to keep score. For the those who are as clueless as me, keeping score in baseball goes way beyond tallying runs!

Codes and symbols are entered onto a scorecard, effectively chronicling every offensive and defensive play of the game. From what friends have told me, baseball fans can read a score book and see the entire game played out in their heads in the same way that musicians can read musical notation and actually "hear the song."

So while I started out as a true scoring novice, by book's end I had a pretty good idea of the whole process. And trust me, if I can figure it out, anyone can! Betsy's Day at the Game would definitely score a home run with any young baseball fan. Using the handy scorecards supplied in the back of the book, fans could easily follow along with and score their favorite team at the park or on TV.

Some Recommended Baseball Resources:

• Aspiring writers will want to check out Greg Bancroft's 10 Things I Didn't Know Until I Published My First Book. If you're planning on breaking into the book biz, you should read this article! 
• See more of Katherine Blackmore's illustrations at her site.
• Check out a tutorial on scoring if you want more examples, plus the formulas to figure out all the stats you would ever need. The actual scorecard isn't as nice as the one in the back of Betsy's Day at the Game, however.
• The Baseball for Kids site features lots of extras for young fans of baseball.
• Taking your child to the park for the first time? Definitely make a Plan B! As parents, we know how attention spans can wane as kids become hot, tired, cranky, over-sugared, and restless. TeachMama has a fabulous set of suggestions for surviving your outing using Kid-Friendly Learning During Baseball Games. 
• Check out some earlier posts on the Teach with Picture Books site including Going Extra Innings with Baseball Picture Books (books and lots of sites for kids about baseball), A League of Their Own: Women in Baseball, and Girls Got Game (incredible female athletes). Let Them Play, discussed in an earlier post on Black History, is another baseball story from history that kids find incredibly intriguing.
  
• With 42, the Jackie Robinson movie, releasing in theaters this weekend, younger readers might be interested in learning more about this courageous hero of baseball history. For readers in grades 2-5, I highly recommend Jackie Robinson: American Hero, written by the star's own daughter, Sharon Robinson. This transitional book features not only the perfect blend of images and text, but also the perfect blend of backstory and biography. Sharon Robinson provides young readers with just enough historical context to understand and appreciate what made Jackie Robinson's accomplishments incredible not only for his time, but for all of time, and not only in sports history, but in our nation's history. If you're a teacher hoping to engage your reluctant readers with chapter books, this one is a winner!

Picture Books: Alive and Well

Some time ago I read a post titled Rescuing Picture Books from Extinction. In that post Kim Yaris expresses dismay that picture book sales are seeing a decline, but she goes on to explore why, and also provides a personal anecdote.

I, too, have heard that picture books will fall at the feet of e-readers and that the era of the printed picture book is dead. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, "Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated."

Want proof that picture books are alive and well? Check out some of the latest Scholastic titles to hit the shelves. These are the types of books that beg to be read in their original large-size format. These are also the types of books that prove that the language of picture books is just as challenging as equivalent-grade (or higher!) chapter books.

In the tradition of The Steadfast Toy Soldier, Captain Sky Blue tells the tale of a favorite toy that once lost, finds its way back to its owner through a series of misadventures. In addition to Richard Egielski's bright illustrations, young readers will love the "pilot talk" liberally mixed throughout the narrative. Aviation terms such such as wilco (I will do it), jink (a quick move to escape danger), spooled up (excited), and brain housing group (a comic term for the skull) introduce students to the idea that jobs and activities have a specialized jargon all their own.

Extensions:

• Ask students to interview parents or other relatives to collect a list of terms which are job specific. Share these in class and discuss why people have developed these lexicons within their vocations. Students may want to share other precise terms they know from sports, music, and other free-time pursuits.
• Assign students a term for research. To what activity or vocation does it refer? What are its origins? Hat trick, for example, refers to three points or consecutive wins by the same player, whether in ice hockey, cricket, or horse racing. Its origin is the hat traditionally bestowed for this accomplishment in cricket (via Wordnik, a pretty cool online dictionary).
• Two themes of Captain Sky Blue are Loss and Determination. Share and discuss other books which explore either of these themes. Challenge students to write their own tales, using one of the mentor texts as a model.

Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow retells the classic story in which Robin Hood, disguised as a one-eyed beggar, bests the Sheriff of Nottingham's favorites to win an archery contest, a contest designed for the sole purpose of catching Robin and his Merry Men. To us this is a familiar tale, but to many students it's brand new!

Author Robert D. San Souci describes his source material in an afterward, and I'm pleased to see that he references Howard Pyle. Howard Pyle's retellings are those that I read as a boy, and to this day my ragged copy is a part of the classroom library. But E.B. Lewis' saturated illustrations make this tale new even for me, and I can't wait to share this book with my students.

Extensions:

• Ask students if they can name other books in which one character devises a plan or mischief to catch another. Why are these stories such fun to read? What makes us root for one character or another? Why in this book did Robin Hood reveal his identity to the Sheriff of Nottingham instead of maintaining the ruse?
• Share other Robin Hood tales with students. Equally famous is Robin's chance meeting with Little John at the middle of a log crossing a stream. Neither man will give way. After reading this tale, ask students: What else could they have done to solve this problem? Can anyone suggest a possible compromise? If they hadn't disagreed in this manner, would their resulting friendship have been as strong?

Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, the author and illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth, team up again in The Odious Ogre. This story of an ogre who is "extraordinarily large, exceedingly ugly, unusually angry, constantly hungry, and absolutely merciless" contains some of the most amazing language I've seen in a picture book in a long time!

You see, the ogre in question has "an impressive vocabulary, due mainly to having inadvertently swallowed a large dictionary while consuming the head librarian in one of the nearby towns."

In his own words:

"No one can resist me... I am invulnerable, impregnable, insuperable, indefatigable, insurmountable."

While the lesson of this book (kindness wins over odiousness) might be a selling point for some, it's the language that wins me over.

Extensions:

• Use this book to introduce students to adjectives and adverbs. I'll admit, at first I was staggered by the words Juster employs, yet they work! How do I know? My first read through was with my seven year-old, who selected the book from the stacks of dozens beside my desk. As she listened to me read the book aloud, she didn't know what several of the terms meant, yet she "felt" what they meant, and she only asked me about a couple of them in a second reading. Truly a testimony for the power of learning vocabulary in context!
• Assign each student one of the book's wonderful words to research, define, use in a context sentence, and illustrate.
• If you haven't already done so, create a "Said is Dead" wall. Revisit The Odious Ogre to collect wonderful speaking tags such as whimpered, sobbed, offered, assure, grunted, admit, mumbled, and insisted. Then ask students to revisit a narrative of their own to revise the dialogue with more exacting language. Instead of she said sadly, a student might write: she lamented, she whined, she whispered with dismay. Each of these expresses sadness, but in different ways.
• Discuss the book's message. The book's last line reads, "She also understood that the terrible things that can happen when you come face-to-face with an Ogre can sometimes happen to the Ogre and not to you." What does that mean? Can this book teach us a lesson about how to respond to people who treat us with odious manners or words?

I look forward to seeing more fabulous picture books from Orchard Books and Michael Di Capua Books. Glad to see that Scholastic is still in the game!

Building a Passion for Poetry

No, I haven't misread my calendar; I do know that April, not May, is National Poetry Month. But now that standardized testing is over for most of us, what better way to explore words and language than through some picture books?

While I'm a huge fan of Prelutsky, Viorst, Silverstein, and the other "giants" of poetry, I'd like to share some authors, titles, and series which might be new to you. These are guaranteed to get kids excited about reading and writing poetry!

A great place to start is with the Graphic Poetry series from Brightpoint Literacy. The sixteen books in the series provide a number of components which help students and teachers alike enjoy and analyze the poems with confidence and understanding. In Pat Mora's Same Song/Maestro, for example, each poem is preceded by an introduction which points out important aspects of the poem students are about to read. The poems are first presented line by line with illustrations, and then as a whole. At book's end, both poems and their common theme (in this case, characterization) are discussed in detail, and some questions for discussion are included. A short feature autobiography of the poet rounds out the book.

In this format, poetry is visual, nonintimidating, and comprehensible (finally!). In other words, the graphic format combats all the complaints I've heard from students who claim that they hate poetry.

If you're seeking a resource for older students, I'd suggest Enslow's Poetry Rocks! series, aimed at middle school and up crowd. You can check out an interactive version of Not the End, But the Beginning at Enslow's site. These volumes are specially designed to get older students in touch with the emotion and meaning of classic poems. Discussion questions, author bios, and selected poem titles are included.

Other great poetry resources? The Words Are Categorical series from First Avenue Editions (Lerner Publishing) teaches students about parts of speech through clever, funny, rhyming verse, as well as some cool cat cartoons. In Lazily, Crazily, Just a Bit Nasally, for example, students learn about adverbs through such lines as

Adverbs sometimes
tell us where,
Like these are here
and those are there.
Often they
will tell us when,
Like this is now and
that was then.
Adverbs sometimes
tell us how,
Like, "Carefully remove this cow."
They let us know
how often too
As in the phrase,
"I seldom chew."

Author Brian Cleary, whose website contains related games and activities, makes parts of speech fun and memorable.

If you're seeking a good teacher-oriented resource for teaching poetry writing, Ralph Fletcher's Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem From the Inside Out helps students move beyond the Humpty-Dumpty rhymes of simple poetry to creating poems that express emotions and capture moments. Although I said it's a resource for teachers, it's actually written in the first person, speaking directly to older students. Some writing clubs and schools have purchased this inexpensive paperback as a student resource. Fletcher's anecdotes, similes for writing, and short exercises make it an enjoyable read. (For a terrific book of poetry models, based on writing topics, check out Fletcher's A Writing Kind Of Day: Poems For Young Poets. Fletcher speaks in a young writer's voice, reflecting upon metaphors, battling writer's block, or connecting one entry to the next).

If you're like me, you love to give students some historical context when teaching literature. The Poetry Basics by Creative Education is a series of hard bound, picture book size titles which provide the history of a specific poetry form. Valerie Bodden's Limericks, for example, traces the form and rhyme scheme all the way back to the 1600s, although the term "limerick" wasn't used until the 1800s. And of course, its most famous proponent, Edward Leer, is given a good bit of ink. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the "how" of the poem, helping students to understand what makes it work. Important literary devices (such as portmanteaus and nonce words) are also discussed. All around, an important series for getting kids into poetry. (Other titles in this series, all written by Valerie Bodden, include Haiku, Concrete Poetry, and Nursery Rhymes).

Recommended Sites

While there are tons of sites about poetry, I'm limiting my recommendations to those which assist students in their own writing.

My top pick is Instant Poetry Forms, which allows students to enter prompted words and verses in order to form (you guessed it!) instant poetry. Some of the forms are purely creative and student-centered, while others allow students to enter researched information (such as data on an early explorer) to create nonfiction verse. An excellent way to encourage your poetry-phobic students (usually the boys!). Each prompt generator includes an example of a finished poem in that style, so students can get a good idea of how the finished poem might sound.

Once students have entered their responses in the prompts, the push of a button publishes the poem. This poem can then be copied and pasted into a word document and further edited, or combined with a free online illustration program such as Sumo Paint.

Another interesting poetry site, although not nearly as diverse and robust, is Scholastic's Poetry Machine which walks students through four poems types: limerick, haiku, cinquain, and free verse.

ReadWriteThink, a fantastic site created by IRA and NCTE, has a number of poetry creators (writing machines) which walk students through the process step-by-step. Teachers can find fully detailed lesson plans for poetry as well, adapted to several grade levels. Students can choose acrostic, diamante, riddle, and shape poems.

Bruce Lansky and Meadowbrook Press have teamed up to create Giggle Poetry, a site not to be missed! Plenty of chances to read, write, and even rate poetry. PoetryTeachers is the sister site, created just for teachers, tutors, and parents. Tons of ideas!

For more lesson plans, check out Ken Nesbitt's poetry lessons at his Poetry4Kids. At the home page you'll find plenty of other resources including a rhyming dictionary and poetry contests.

Need more ideas? Check out this set of Interactive Poetry Tools and Lesson Plans. Why reinvent the wheel?

Have more poetry sites and books you'd recommend? Leave a comment below, or email me directly.

As Seen on TV! Media Messages Unmasked

Our students represent a lucrative target audience. Companies bombard them daily with ads through every possible venue, so much so that most advertising is now an integral, barely noticed part of the American landscape.

And there's the rub. Barely noticed, yet there, exerting a powerful influence on how children choose to buy, think, and act.

In previous posts I've discussed persuasive writing (Convince Me: Real-Life Uses for Persuasive Writing and So What’s Your Point? Persuasive Writing Using Picture Books) as well as financial literacy (Dollars and Sense for Students). Now Scholastic has teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission to combine these two ideas, plus the concept of media literacy, to produce the Admongo site and its related teacher resources.

The FTC site explains that

Advertising is a multi-million dollar business. Truthful advertising provides benefits to consumers and competition. It gives consumers the information they need to make better-informed purchasing and product use decisions. It also gives companies an incentive to modify their products to provide features that customers want. By contrast, false advertising interferes with decision-making and hinders competition.

Tweens have their own money to spend, and parents report that children play an important role in family buying decisions. Because kids are an important part of the marketplace, they often are the targets of advertising and marketing programs. The result is that American kids see ads wherever they go.

The four components of the campaign (a game-based website at Admongo.gov, sample ads that can be used in the classroom; a free curriculum, and teacher training videos) are designed to help students learn to ask three key "critical thinking" questions when they encounter advertising:

• Who is responsible for the ad?
• What is the ad actually saying?
• What does the ad want me to do?

While I personally used authentic ads that children know (and strangely love), I appreciate that this program offers fictitious yet genuine-looking ads and videos for classroom discussion. The advantage to the fake ads is that children can't assume they know the product and its merits; students definitely paid closer attention to the details.

So why study advertising? There is perhaps no better real-world use of critical thinking and reading skills than the accurate interpretation of mainstream media. Because so many of our daily thoughts and actions are based upon what we're told to believe, it's imperative that we become more educated and discerning in our media consumption. Media literacy allows students to put discrete reading and writing skills to work as they learn advertising's tricks of the trade.

Additional Recommended Sites

While the Scholastic resources and the Admongo site are impressive and complete in themselves, I also recommend the following resources:

• Co-Co's AdverSmarts: An Interactive Unit on Food Marketing on the Web is "an interactive unit designed to help kids between the ages of 5 and 8 recognize the marketing techniques used on commercial web sites that target children." I'd use this site for the younger set (up to fourth grade).
• Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is an intelligent and innovative program aimed at helping girls understand that self-image isn't dependent upon media messages. While you're at that site, be sure to check out the teacher resources.
• The Ad Council has provided access to many of the campaigns from its 60 years of existence. The quality and impact of their PSAs (Public Service Announcements) is legendary, and students should see that ad techniques can actually be used for good rather than evil. Need an example? Check out this video on Reducing Gun Crime (also embedded below).

Viral

Reducing Gun Violence-Babies | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

Recommended Books

One terrific companion book for the classroom is Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know by Shari Graydon (Annick Press). For older students, this book is a terrific expose of how persuasive writing is used to influence consumers. It's also a pretty cool "idea book" for putting persuasive writing skills to work.

For younger students, Do I Need It? Or Do I Want It? by Jennifer S. Larson (Lerner) is an attractive yet informative choice, allowing opportunities for lots of discussion about what we choose to buy and why. (Be sure to check out other titles in Lerner's Exploring Economics series).

Pretty in Print: Questioning Magazines by Stergios Botzakis, TV Takeover: Questioning TV by Guofang Wan, and Virtually True: Questioning Online Media by Guofang Wan are part of the Media Literacy series published by Capstone Press. All of the titles are organized around five basic questions:

• Who made the message and why?
• Who is the message for?
• How might others view the message differently?
• What is left out of the media?
• How does the message get and keep my attention?

An easy to read style, plenty of photos and illustrations, and try-it-out activities help students see that advertising isn't entirely about "going over to the dark side." Students instead realize that persuasive media offers many opportunities for creative people who are up to the challenge of getting messages across to audiences in the most effective ways possible.

Big Changes

Raina Telgemeier's Smile is about big changes in a young girl's life. No, not those kinds of changes (although as a father to two girls I'll have my share of those awkward moments). We're talking instead about subtler changes, hinted at from the start by the book's cover, which features a brace-clad smiley face. From Scholastic's Booktalk:

Aah, hanging out with your friends. You laugh. You go shopping. You have sleepovers and you always have fun. Well, imagine this: you and your friends are chasing each other one day and you trip. When you fall, you hit the cement. You hit the cement so hard that you knock out your two front teeth! This is exactly what happens to the character of Raina in the graphic novel Smile by Raina Telgemeier.

After an emergency trip to Dr. Golden's office, the dentist glues Raina's teeth back into her mouth. He covers them in gauze that soon becomes soggy and gross. When Raina takes off the gauze, she discovers that the teeth have been inserted too far. Now she looks like a vampire! Going to school looking like a vampire will definitely make boys notice her, but not in a good way.

While the book on its simplest level is the story of Raina's teeth trials, on a much larger level it's the story of a girl who struggles to maintain her own identity while still fitting in. One part I particularly love is when Raina comes to the realization that she has to move on from her former friends, who are acting less and less supportive, to a new circle of friends in high school. These transitions happen in real life, of course, but less often in middle school lit. Too often we're offered a much simpler, pat solution.

I love Smile for a number of reasons:

• It fits in with my year-long theme of Survival. While it's not survival in the life-and-death sense of The Devils' Arithmetic, it's as authentic (but not as gritty as) The Outsiders. Personally I'd rather face a multitude of other dangers before ever agreeing to be a middle school girl! Other themes for this book include Identity, Acceptance, Affiliation, Change, Coming of Age, Conflict, Choices, Relationships, Loyalty, Conformity, Belonging, and Differences.
• Its autobiographical format makes it more authentic. Truth is absolutely stranger than fiction, and we feel for our protagonist here because she is so true-to-life. (Learn more about Raina at her site).
• The narrative flows without gaps. Many graphic novels assume that readers will be able to plug bill holes between frames. At no time, however, does Telgemeier leave us wondering what we missed.
• The overall design and illustration are flawless. My six year-old was so taken with the illustrations that she squirreled away with the book for two hours, and "read" it from cover to cover, reading, of course, just those words she could. (She then asked to have it read aloud to her before bed each night). To get a good feel for the book's flow, check out this video trailer from Scholastic.
• Scholastic has printed it in standard paperback, rather than oversize, format. This not only allows the book to handled more easily, but avoids the look of a graphic novel. Some students would rather their friends see them with a chapter book than a "comic book." See how cruel middle school can be?
• It uses comic conventions. Thus readers who are successful with this book may move on to other graphic novels, which in turn will keep them reading. (Need some suggestions? Check out this previous post on Graphic Novels and New Literacies from this site).
• Scholastic has provided a very cool Make Your Own Smile Graphix site (see the screen shot here) where students can manipulate scenes, characters, objects, and speech bubbles to create their own stories.

A conference attendee once asked if I'd use a graphic novel (like Smile) for a classroom study, but I know full well that students would race to the end of their own. But I guess that's a good thing, right? And that's also why my classroom shelves boast a nice supply of these books.

Teacher Book Wizard

Scholastic's Teacher Book Wizard is a truly awesome resource for teachers. I highly recommend you check out the video tour of all the features.

At its simplest, the Book Wizard is a database of 50,000 books, available from different publishers. You can search by author, title, key word, reading level, or themed book lists. Book results contain author information, vocabulary lists, and age-appropriate extension activities. The Leveled Search option allows you to search by interest and reading levels, language, book type, and even genre.

Teachers who try Book Wizard seem most excited about the BookAlike feature which allows you to find books similar to one you've already read. For example, if a student loves The Magic Treehouse series, you can enter that title to see other books which may be appealing. The slide feature allows you to return results that are at, above, or below the original level. So for that fourth grader who picked out Shiloh but finds it too challenging, the BookAlike feature would recommend Ribsy or Stone Fox as more appropriate grade-level choices. In my experience I've had lots of parents ask for book suggestions at parent-teacher conferences. Having the BookAlike feature available makes such suggestions a breeze! Students could even be taught how to use this resource for themselves.

List Exchange allows teachers, authors, and celebrities to share lists of favorite books. These are searchable as well. See a list you like? You can save it and then customize it to make your own.

A final feature allows you to use search results or book lists to create online purchase orders. One click formats the book list as a purchase order, with all math done online. But truthfully, for the average classroom teacher, that's probably the least impressive function.

Picture Book Previews

Originally created as book talks and mini-commercials for book fairs, the sixty-five book videos at Scholastic provide power previews and instant incentives for young readers.

I recently used the book trailer for Swindle by Gordon Korman to get my students excited about that novel. This video in particular plays out like a movie preview. Other videos, such as that for Chasing Vermeer, are traditional book talks with engaging questions for the reader, while others, such as Lily Brown's Paintings, provide students a peek behind the author's process of creating a book.

For whatever reason, these videos aren't easy to find on the site, and typically don't show up in the search results for the individual authors. But now you've got the link to explore them all, so off you go! See for yourself what great resources these videos can be.