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