Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Slice of Life: Best Laid Plans Preempted!

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 
to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.
Thanks to Stacey, Betsy, Beth, Kathleen, Deb, Lisa, Melanie, and Lanny
 for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday and nurturing our writing lives.

Books, Brownies, and Beyond, our after school book club, finally met after missing two weeks of meetings.  My new grandson's birth caused the cancellation of our last meeting in January.  And the next Tuesday was a snow day for our school district.  

So we were excited to meet last week on Valentine's Day to celebrate the conclusion of our Mock Newbery.  We had a free book for each member of the book club.  Our local independent bookstore, Island Books, generously provides ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) for us.  The three students who selected The Girl Who Drank the Moon as winner for our Mock Newbery were invited to the table of free books first.  Then we continued through each member present, beginning with those who had read the most books and continuing through the list until each student participant got to choose a free book.  As a group, we read sixty-six books for our Mock Newbery event which started near the end of October and continued until the announcement of the
Newbery award in January.  

I planned for our Valentine's Day meeting to be a celebration of book love.  I distributed reader heart maps to each student and asked them to create their own celebration on the heart map.  It could be authors, favorite books, favorite genres or places to read, why they love book club.  The creation was up to them.  I planned to take photos of their heart maps for this post, but something else took precedence over the creation of the heart maps.  I ended up with only three completed heart maps, but hopefully may have more to post after our mid-winter break.



As I looked around the room, I was thrilled to see that most of the students were diving into their books, unable to resist the lure of a new book calling out to them.  So while the creation of our reader heart maps may have taken a back seat, I celebrate the readers who couldn't wait to begin reading their new books.  

And when we return from mid-winter break, we'll begin book discussions for the five titles selected for
African American History Month:
Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper 
Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson 
The Seventh Most Important Thing by Shelley Pearsall
Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes

11 comments:

  1. What a fun group to have! They are so lucky to have you and the library system to support them.

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  2. I want to be in the group! What fun. It's great you have os much support for a club like this.

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  3. Love those beautiful heart maps! (Speaking of which, did you see Fran McVeigh's post about heart mapping last week?)

    Congratulations on the birth of your grandbaby. I think I missed that news.

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    1. Fran's post actually spurred me to look up Reader's Heart Maps in Georgia Heard's book. Not sure how you could have missed the birth of my grandson. I write about it all the time & promised myself to slice about something else this week. There are pics on earlier posts.

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  4. Oh, I wish I was part of your group! I bet this is the highlight of your week...and theirs!

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  5. You are bringing such joy to those readers/kids, Ramona. It is so exciting to see such a large group. And the bookstore is awesome to save the ARCs for them!

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  6. I love the idea of reading heart maps, Ramona - you have a committed group of readers there!

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  7. Always love reading about this group! How great they are readers who can't resist a new book.

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  8. Such an uplifting post! Congratulations to all of your readers.

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  9. Reading heart maps are a great idea! These children are lucky to have you cheering on their reading lives and identities.

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  10. I love, love, love that these kids would rather read than do anything else, even a project that is fun and "crafty." And it looks like you have some terrific titles lined up for next month!

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