The school’s three book clubs have wound up for the summer. After a year full of reading and discussion, shared lunches and case loads of Oreo cookies, playing with Photo Story to create book trailers, two electronic conferences and a wiki, and one abortive author visit, student readers are heading out of the school library [...]
Last week I held end-of-year celebrations for the members of the Reading Hall of Fame, all 163 of them. After the Hall of Fame closed for the year, on May 29th, I spent the better part of a week checking a bin full of reading logs that students had submitted at the last minute, and [...]
When Michael gets home from school, and his mother asks him about his day, he regales her with stories about his classmates, stories that celebrate bodily functions. Michael tells his mother about the booger that comes to decorate the top of a birthday cookie, she responds with, “Don’t say that word!” Michael fairs [...]
Ten year-old Lucky Trimble lives with her guardian Brigitte in a cobbled-together trailer home on the edge of Hard Pan, California, population 43. Perched in the Mojave Desert, on the site of an old gold mining town, Hard Pan is home to an odd collection of individuals who have known hard times. The Captain, a [...]
Buttercup is a black and white dairy cow who spends a lovely day grazing in the fields with the rest of the herd and taking pleasure in everything that she discovers around her – the blue sky dotted with clouds, the rolling hills covered in tender, green grass, the creek that wends its way through [...]
