With his father gone, it falls to eleven-year old Gregor to look after his two-year old sister, Boots, and keep an eye on their senile grandmother, since his mother works long hours to support the family. On a hot July afternoon Gregor grabs the laundry, and Boots, and heads for the laundry room to get [...]
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 [...]
Twelve-year old Percy Jackson seems to be plagued by bad luck. Constantly in trouble at his upper New York state boarding school, hounded by a nasty classmate named Nancy Bobofit, and struggling with both dyslexia and ADHD, it’s like he’s an accident waiting for a place to happen. And it happens inside one of the [...]
Last week, I held information meetings for three Book Clubs, the Boys’ Book Club, for boys in Grade 4, 5 and 6, the Girls’ Book Club, for girls in Grades 4, 5 and 6, and the Intermediate Book Club, for students in Grades 7 and 8.
The boys met at lunch on Monday. There was [...]
Flying northwest in a single engine plane to spend the summer in the oil fields of northern Canada with his engineer father, thirteen year-old Brian Robeson is angry over his parents’ recent divorce yet eager to see his father again, after several months’ absence. The pilot seems friendly, and shows Brian how to hold [...]
In the midst of fighting a forest fire in the interior of British Columbia, Forest Ranger Garrett Brock notices something usual, a she-wolf moving in and out of the fire, carrying something in her mouth. After the fire is out, Brock stumbles upon the she-wolf’s cache, and finds her four newborn wolf cubs. [...]
The Boys’ Book Club, for boys in Grades 4 to 6, has started up again. Some 35 boys have joined, and, after lengthy discussions, we have agreed to start with Edo Van Belkom’s Wolf Pack, which won the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch prize for fiction in 2006.
While we [...]
Young Will Trenom is used to crazy. He lives with his rather less-than-normal parents in a bed and breakfast run by Mrs. D and her game-show addicted husband. But even Will cannot understand why someone would want to move into a run-down old cottage that stands in the middle of a cemetery, particularly [...]
The boys in the Boys’ Book Club have drawn diagrams of Argo Manor. To view their work, click on the images below!
For eleven-year-old twins, Jason and Julia Covenant, moving into Argo Manor, a rambling old house perched on a cliff over the sea in Cornwall, is the beginning of a strange and wonderful adventure. With their new friend, Rick Banner, they explore the many rooms of the house, particularly the odd tower room filled with [...]
