Disney has acquired screen rights to the young adult novel “Wings” and will develop the Aprilynne Pike title as a film for Miley Cyrus.  Source

Not sure what I think about this.  I haven’t read Wings yet but I do plan to.  Anyone who read the book have thoughts on this?

• It’s official! The Hunger Games movie is now in production and set for international release in 2011.  Woohoo!!
• The first trailer for Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief has been released.  What do you think? It definitely has that superhero movie look, but I like it so far!

Announcing the Second Annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week

September 14-18, 2009

I wanted to let you know about the announcement of this year’s Book Blogger Appreciation Week!  Somehow, I missed out on the celebration last year, but I promised myself I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

This year, the celebration will be held September 14th through the 18th. If you are a book blogger and want to register, you can do that on the website below:

http://bookbloggerappreciationweek.com/

Tomorrow they will be starting nominations for this year’s book blogger awards. 

Are you a book blogger?  Be sure to register by filling out the registration form! Registering ensures your inclusion in the BBAW 09 Database of Book Bloggers and enters you into the drawing for the BBAW 09 Grand Prize!

On behalf of the 2009 Amelia Elizabeth Walden Book Award Committee (sponsored by ALAN), I am happy to share the following press release:

Inaugural Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for Young Adult Fiction Launched

The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is pleased and proud to announce the first annual Amelia Elizabeth Walden Book Award.

Established in 2008 to honor the wishes of young adult author, Amelia Elizabeth Walden, the award allows for the sum of $5,000 to be presented annually to the author of a young adult title selected by the ALAN Amelia Elizabeth Walden Book Award Committee as demonstrating a positive approach to life, widespread teen appeal, and literary merit.

Amelia Elizabeth Walden was born in New York City on January 15, 1909. She graduated from Columbia University in 1934 and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. From 1935 to 1945, she taught English and Dramatics at Norwalk High School in Connecticut. Walden wrote over 40 novels for young adults. She passed away in 2002 in Westport, Connecticut.

***ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE FINALISTS FORTHCOMING***

Over the past year, the ALAN Award Committee members considered 232 young adult titles for this inaugural award. The finalists will be announced on Friday, July 17, 2009. The winning title will be revealed at the November 2009 ALAN Workshop in Philadelphia, PA. A reception will be held in honor of all finalists, each of whom will be invited to participate in a public reading.

For more information about the award, please contact the 2009 AEW Award Committee Chair, Wendy Glenn, at wendy.glenn@uconn.edu.

Be sure to check out Susan Beth Pfeffer’s blog to see the recently-released cover of her newest novel, This World We Live In.  It is a follow-up to her NY Times best-selling books Life As We Knew It and the dead and the gone.

Both books are always hot, hot, hot in my classroom so I can not wait to read This World We Live In. And the cover is AWESOME!

Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis sat on my bookshelf since I received it from the publisher a few weeks ago.  For some reason it never caught my eye, until I recently read Jen’s review.  I started reading the book while watching my puppy play in the grass and finished it the next day.  I can’t recommend it enough!  I am always on the lookout for WWII fiction and non-fiction for our Holocaust unit.  I especially keep my eye out for books that focus on parts of the war that aren’t always mentioned in the history books.  This past year some of my students read about the WASPs and ended up doing their National History Day project on Jackie Cochrane and the learned so much.  Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis is a new novel I can’t wait to add to my classroom library!

High school sophomore Octavia and her seventeen year-old sister, Tali, are being forced by their parents to go on a cross-country road trip with with their grandmother.  Now, maybe if their grandmother was a normal grandma this trip would be fun.  Instead, Mare (no using “Granny” here!), wears high heels, bright red lipstick, wigs, and drives like a bat out of hell.  But it’s during the course of the trip that the girls learn their grandmother was a member of the 6888th African American battalion of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II.  

While the long, meandering ride seems torturous at first, Octavia and Tali find themselves slowly drawn into the story their grandmother begins telling.  It turns out she’s lived a pretty amazing life- one that her granddaughters have never been aware of until this trip.  The story is told in alternating voices- Octavia “now” and Mare “then”.  Even though the narrator changes every few chapters, it rarely jarred me out of the story.  Octavia’s voice is so modern that there were never a doubt I was reading about the present.  Mare’s mid-century, Alabaman voice was pitch perfect for the “then” stories.  

This is different from many historical novels, which are usually a hard sell when it comes to my students.  The modern-day chapters add an interesting dimension to the book and I think that will be a turn-on for my students.  At the same time, Mare’s story is historical fiction at its best.  It’s the perfect mash-up for my readers.  

As Jen noted in her review, this is a novel that begs to be read aloud.  The voices are just so perfect that I could hear them in my head while I was reading.  Tanita Davis has done a great job and I can’t want to share this with my students.  

Personally, I loved this book because I love knowing “what happened” at all aspects of the story.  I want to really know the characters I am reading about and by telling the story through both Mare and Octavia’s voices I felt like I was truly getting the entire story.  I love that!

Time for a bit of prize winning fun! I am giving away a FREE  autographed copy of Barry Lyga’s The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl  to one lucky email subscriber!  

Why?  

To celebrate my two year anniversary of blogging!  I posted my first review, of Sarah Beth Durst’s Into the Wild on July 4th, 2007.  I’ve been reading, reviewing, and sharing my experiences in the classroom ever since.  

Want to win?

How to Enter:
There are two simple steps you have to follow to win the autographed book:

1. Subscribe to TheReadingZone by email before Friday, July 24th. Just Subscribe to TheReadingZone by Email.  When you subscribe by email you will get notified anytime I post a new entry on the blog.  You can also unsubscribe at any time.  It’s a great alternative to using an RSS feed, like Bloglines or Google.  

2. Leave a comment on ANY post on TheReadingZone using the same email address you entered above.

Once you have completed both steps you will be entered to win the book.  Want some extra entries?  Post about this contest on your blog, tweet it, facebook  it, etc!  Just leave a separate comment on this post with a link.  (This has to be separate from the comment above!)  

Rules:

• contest only open to U.S. residents
• contest ends Friday, July 24th

Rebecca Stead’s First Light was the second book I reviewed when I started blogging. When her newest novel, When You Reach Me, started getting buzz on various blogs that I read I knew I wanted to read it when it was published in July.  

When You Reach Me is historical fiction, though I don’t think a lot of kids will even realize it.  Set in 1978, I felt subtly pulled into a different era, yet much of it was familiar. Miranda is in 6th grade, an age I know well.  Anyone who has ever been on the cusp of middle school knows what a strange world it is- one where friendships change overnight, crushes are born, and parents seem to aim only to embarrass you.  Miranda already has enough to deal with as a 6th grader so when a mystery falls into her lap she does her best to ignore it.  After all, she has a lot on her mind!  Her best friend, Sal, stopped hanging out with her.  Her mom is about to be a contestant on the $20,000 Pyramid, and she might be developing a crush on a boy in her class.  

But when Miranda receives a series of strangely prophetic letters over the course of a few months, she doesn’t know what to do.  It all begins when she finds a small, stiff piece of paper bearing the following message:

M,

This is hard. Harder than I expected, even with your help. But I have been practicing, and my preparations go well. I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own. I ask two favors. First, that you write me a letter. Second, that you remember to mention the location of your house key in the letter. The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.

Each letter is odd and they seem to get stranger as the book goes on.  But when Miranda reaches the conclusion of the notes as a tragedy is sort-of-averted, you will be astonished.  I certainly was!

This is a book that is different from any other book I have read.  As a huge fan of Madeline L’Engle’s books, especially A Wrinkle in Time, Miranda’s love of the same book was a familiar one for me.  I have a feeling Rebecca Stead was also a huge fan of A Wrinkle in Time.  But this is a hard book to describe without giving away spoilers.  All I can say is go out and pre-order this one!  It ships in just a couple of weeks.

I can’t wait to read this to my class next fall.  Each chapter is short and ends on a paragraph that will have kids begging you to read more.  It’s also a fairly quick read, which I will need with my new schedule.  And I think it will garner quite a few shiny stickers come award season!

I can also imagine booktalking this one.  In 6th grade I have a lot students who enjoy the tv show LOST (as do I).  I would call When You Reach Me LOST for the middle school set.  The strands of the story all start weaving themselves together, leaving you breathless at the end, much as I imagine I will be at the end of the final season of LOST.  There’s mystery woven throughout the book yet it also feels entirely realistic.  All in all, a perfect read.

At the end of the school year I give an evaluation to all of my students, looking for their opinion on our reading workshop.  I always learn a lot from the evaluations every year, but this year’s evaluation was especially important to me.  Because I will be moving from a two hour block to less than one hour per period, I was especially interested in what my students deemed the most valuable elements of our reading workshop.  While I know what I consider valuable, I wanted to take their ideas into account while planning this summer.

On the evaluation, I asked my students the following question (special thanks to Donalyn Miller for her amazing book, which inspired this question):

9. In the next section, put a checkmark next to the elements of this class that have helped you as a reader.  Circle which factor was MOST important to you.

_Classroom library

_School librarian/library

_Booktalks

_Independent Reading time in class

_Class read-alouds

_teacher who reads

_conversations with classmates

_literature circles

_letter-essays

_monthly reading logs

_Other_______________

 

I was fascinated by my students’ responses.  This is the first time I have asked my classes to rank the elements of our reading workshop and boy, am I glad I did!  Knowing I will have to rework my schedule a lot next year, I was interested to learn what my students’ considered to be non-negotiables, elements I could not leave out next year.

What are my non-negotiables, according to them, in order of importance?

1. Booktalks
2. Read-alouds
3. Teacher who reads
4. Classroom library
5. Conversations with classmates
6. Independent reading time in class
7. Letter-essays

Now, a teacher who reads, a classroom library, and letter-essays weren’t in danger of disappearing when my schedule changes.  However, booktalks, read-alouds, conversations with classmates, and independent reading time  will have to be reworked.  I’m thrilled that my booktalks and read-alouds are considered vital by  my students!  

What I find interesting is that the majority of the elements listed above are NOT part of most language arts classrooms.  Classrooms, especially in intermediate and middle schools, are full of basal readers, literature sets, leveled readers, and lectures. 

Read-alouds are considered “silly” once students reach a certain age in most schools, yet my students considered them vital to the culture of reading in our workshop.  As I’ve mentioned before, they begged to read more everyday in our read-alouds.  Plus, the read-alouds permit me to introduce a variety of genres and authors in the classroom and as a result, the students usually go on to read more books from the author or genre.  Without read-alouds, they might not have been exposed to those books or had the confidence to try them on their own.

Booktalks are done sometimes, with little regularity, in most classrooms I encounter.  The person doing the booktalk is usually a student who is presenting the book as part of a book report or other graded assignment.  They are rarely enthusiastic about the novel they are presenting, which doesn’t encourage anyone else to pick up the book.  If the teacher who models booktalks is enthusiastic about reading and books, that will be reflected in the classroom!

We also come back to the idea of social reading, as Jen Robinson wrote on Booklights a few days ago.  Conversations with classmates were high on the list of elements my students noted as vital to the classroom culture and workshop.  A few also wrote in “conversations with teacher” in the “Other” field.  We need to  harness this!  Classroom teachers MUST make time for their students to talk about books with each other.  And teachers must share their own love of books and reading through conversations and conferences with students.  You don’t have to be a bibliophile in order to teach language arts, but you should have books that you enjoy reading and sharing with your students.

Save Ohio’s Libraries!
Governor Strickland of Ohio has recommended the elimination of $200+ million from the Public Library Fund over the next two years. This means libraries will close, librarians will be laid off, and children all over Ohio won’t be able to access books!

WHAT YOU CAN DO: You have until July 1, 2009 to be heard! Visit OLC.org and SaveOhioLibraries for more info.  

If Ohio passes this legislation, more states will follow. Don’t let this happen!