Reading list for the 2014-2015 school year

Girls With Opinions took a break for the summer as vacations etc. would make it hard to find a time we could all meet.  The girls are now entering 3rd grade and we are so excited for another year of book club fun.  The girls read BREAKAWAY by Andrea Montalbano over the summer and will start the year off with that book.

Our 2014-2015 book list is as follows.

1.  BREAKAWAY by Andrea Montalbano
2.  THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING GHOST (Boxcar Children #31) by Gertrude Chandler Warner
3.  RAMONA QUIMBY, AGE 8 by Beverly Cleary
4.  THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER by Barbara Robinson
5.  PIPER REED, THE GREAT GYPSY (also published as PIPER REED, CLUBHOUSE QUEEN) by Kimberly Willis Holt
6.  HOW TO STEAL A DOG by Barbara O'Connor
7.  RULES by Cynthia Lord
8.  PICTURES OF HOLLIS WOODS by Patricia Reilly Giff
9. ANASTASIA KRUPNIK by Lois Lowry
Summer selection for 2015- FLORA AND ULYSSES: THE ILLUMINATED ADVENTURES by Kate DiCamillo

Looking forward to a great year!

Just Grace and The Flower Girl Power- Meeting #6

Our sixth book Just Grace and the Flower Girl Power was our first deviation from the Mighty Girl Reading List.  As I've read many Mighty Girl selections, I'm finding a ton of contenders for them when they get older, but we weren't finding so many for their age level after reading five selections from the list already.  A few we could have read now, but I think their messages will make more of an impact when the girls are 3rd and 4th graders.  So I've been scouring the internet for books and came upon this silly little book.  Most of our girls like graphic novels (BabyMouse, Amulet, etc.) so I thought this book would be right up their alley.  It ended up being a hit with the girls.  The style of the book is short paragraphs with comic strip illustrations.  The light story line was perfect for the end of the school year.  This was our last meeting of this school year, and will pick back up with book club in September.  The next book selection is assigned for the whole summer.  With vacations, etc. we figured book club during summer would be difficult to coordinate, and decided on a summer selection that they would have a few months to read.

We were greeted by this cute sign ;)

Two of our girls weren't able to make it.  Strep throat has made the rounds in Houston, Texas.  One had piles of homework to complete after being out with it last week, and one had come down with strep the day before.  We were so sad they couldn't be there.  I have to say that it is VERY sweet how much these girls want to be at book club.  They are so bummed to miss it, and I'm glad they love book club so much.

The girls liked the book.  We had all thumbs up.  I really was wondering how our discussion would go (since the book didn't deal with any major issues, and was a silly book) but they had lots of opinions to share.  We used our general discussion questions.  The moms laughed and laughed at these girls.  They are so opinionated.  When asked what they would change about the book, one girl expressed that she really wishes Luke (a UPS man) would have worn some different costumes.  Cracked us up.  Look at these girls!

all have something to say.

this peanut always has something to share.  love her!

The host mama really rocked planning this whole meeting.  She found the cutest craft, served Chik Fil A nuggets, and generally raised the bar for all future book club meetings ;)  Here is the craft she found for the girls to do.

Tissue paper flower bouquets

She had the tissue paper precut and taught the girls how to make the flowers.  They loved them!

our fearless leader teaching the girls how to make the bouquets

striking a pose with their bouquets (sassy!)

such good friends!

Due to computer issues, I did not hand out bottle cap buttons for their lanyards but promised them for next meeting ;)  Here are the bottlecap images for Just Grace and the Flower Girl power.

Year of the Dog- meeting #5

Our fifth book The Year of the Dog followed a Taiwanese American named Pacy through a year of her life as she attempted to find herself and her talent.  Its a cute book with cartoon illustrations inside as well that the girls loved.  

I purchased some Chinese fans and chinese new year themed napkins from a party store to make the table more festive.  The girls had Ginger Lime chicken bites and white rice with soy sauce for dinner.  (If you leave off the green onions, kids generally like it.  Its a family favorite at my house and easy to prepare).

Festive dinner girls

The girls liked the book.  We had all thumbs up.  The book deals with themes about race and culture that was eye opening for the girls.  In one scene, Pacy decides she cannot try out for the role of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz because she is Taiwanese American.  There is also a camp she attends with other Taiwanese Americans where some girls make fun of her and call her the name "twinkie" (yellow on the outside but white on the inside) because she does not speak Taiwanese.  One of the girls has a close family friend who is Taiwanese American, so the book was exciting for her to read and learn about her friend's family customs.  Every new year, she gets a red envelope from her friend with money for luck.  The book does a great job of sharing different Taiwanese traditions, and also how the family in the book blends both cultures.  

Some discussion questions for the book we used were from this study guide at Grace Lin's website.  


For the activity, we used two activities from Grace Lin's website.  I used the snipping tool on the computer to pull the images off the website and imbed in a Word Document so we could print them out as a worksheet.

The first was a drawing sheet how to draw the dog.  We printed this out and gave to the girls as a fun worksheet.
Dog worksheet


The second was instructions for how to paint the FU (for luck).  Here are the instructions:  
Grace Lin Chinese New Year banner craft instructions

We gave the girls red paper plates and yellow paint to paint the FU on.  I printed this worksheet with the image of how to draw the FU for each to use as reference.
How to draw FU worksheet

As always, at the end of the meeting, I gave the girls their bottle cap buttons for their lanyards.  
Here are the bottlecap images for The Year of the Dog.

Lanyard is filling up ;)

The Magic Half- Meeting #4

Our fourth book The Magic Half was written by the same author as Ivy and Bean (which most of the girls have read in the past and loved).  It involves time travel between present day and 1935, twins, and some magic.

The host mama's daughter made this adorable sign to greet her guests.

The host mama served the girls a dinner of corndogs, tator tots, and juice boxes and had some other snacks out on the table.  Typically we have our discussion of the book as the girls eat.  

Most of the girls liked the book.  We had all thumbs up, and one thumbs down.  They discussed whether or not they would have gone back in time or not, and how the girls helped each other.  I know I say this every time, but the moms are always so impressed with how much the girls remember from the book, how their opinions differ (and they proudly share their views), and how much insight they have into the stories/characters.  They are really thinking about what they read.  I would have never imagined that the conversations would be so rich and interesting.

hands raised

lots of opinions ;)

For the activity, the girls wrote themselves letters for the future to be opened in 10 years (when they are 18 and seniors in high school....hard to imagine!).  Prior to the meeting, an email was sent to the moms asking for input from the girls about the trends for this school year.  I found most of the stuff by googling, and by just knowing what the girls are into.  We included those two printed pages in the letter, along with their letter to themselves.  Due to their ages, we felt that a free form letter would take more time/scaffolding from the adults, so we made a template for them to fill out about their interests now, and their predictions for the future.

 This has some good prompts for an open ended letter.  This was used as inspiration for our template.  I found it via Google from TeacherWeb.
Write a Letter to Your Future Self

Here is the template we created for the girls to fill out.
Letter to the Future template

Here is our trend sheet to be included with the letter.
Trends from 2013-2014 school year
(For whatever reason, the formatting is always getting screwy with this one.  It IS possible to fit it on two pages if you mess with it.  I don't know why it keeps changing on me).

The host mama also printed out two sheets of personalized stationary for each girl so they could add a real letter to themselves.  

As always, at the end of the meeting, I gave the girls their bottle cap buttons for their lanyards.  
Here are the bottlecap images for The Magic Half.

Turtle In Paradise- meeting #3

eating dinner- we only had 5 girls this time as one of our girls was sick :(

 Our third book Turtle In Paradise takes place in the 1930s in Key West.  The girls are all fans of Jennifer L. Holm's graphic novel series BABYMOUSE so it was interesting to us all to see her versatility as an author.  Although nothing like BABYMOUSE, it is a great little read and a fun adventure story.  It was really interesting for the girls to read about a young girl's adventure during the depression era, and many references to comic strips, foods, places, and products were foreign to them.  I found a website called HELP READERS LOVE READING written by an amazing teacher who is doing his part to make reading more interesting to his students.  It takes the book chapter by chapter and shows pictures of actual places, maps, comic strips, and even YouTube videos that show Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, and Shirley Temple.  

For our discussion, I brought my laptop to the host mama's house and using an HDMI cord, was able to show this website on the TV screen.  We wove our general discussion questions into the presentation/discussion.  He even gives question prompts on each page asking the girls things like "In chapter 14 she compares Pork Chop and Beans to Laurel and Hardy.  What does she mean with that comparison?"  I can't say enough about this site.  Its awesome! 
Help Readers Love Reading- Turtle in Paradise pages

watching Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing

 

watching The Three Stooges

I'm always amazed at how much the girls remember from the books and their opinions about the story.  They are so savvy and think so much about the characters and their points of view.  I love the discussions with them.  


Instead of doing a craft this time, I thought it would be fun for the girls to do vintage inspired hairstyles using a headband.  I found this YouTube tutorial on how to stick your hair into an elastic headband to make it look like a messy updo.
Quick and Easy Vintage Hairstyle Headband tutorial

The girls watching the tutorial

Vintage inspired hairdos

so cute!

Because I like craft projects, I decided to make the headbands using fold over elastic and the following rosette tutorial.  But you could just as easily get some elastic headbands without embellishment and have just as much fun doing hairstyles.  

I used this tutorial to make the flowers for the headbands using old T-shirts:
T-shirt rosette tutorial
I thought this was a nice tie in to the book as well since the Depression era was all about stretching your dollar.  The original reduce, reuse, recycle.  

Fold over elastic is way more expensive and precut to 1 yd. lengths at Jo-Anns.  I got more for my money by ordering from Etsy.  
Shabby Rose Trim fold over elastic for headbands

For those who don't want to make rosettes but would like to trim out the headbands, they have affordable flowers available on ShabbyRoseTrim's store.

I've also noticed that a new trend in headbands is basically fold over elastic tied in a knot at one end.  Couldn't be easier to make that.  If you order your FOE from ShabbyRose, and cut and tie, you can recreate those for a lot less than the stores sell them for.

As always, at the end of the meeting, I gave the girls their bottle cap buttons for their lanyards.  
Here are the bottlecap images for Turtle in Paradise.

Official book club stamp!

One of the suggestions from A Mighty Girl's book club organizing guide was to consider buying two copies of each book (so Mom and Daughter can both read without sharing the same copy).  After finishing that selection, one copy could be donated to a classroom library, community group, etc.  My daughter has the most fabulous teacher (shout out to Ms. Anastasia, if you are reading this!) and we are going to donate a copy of each book to her classroom library.  I also lost a dear friend last month who was a school secretary at a local elementary school and I want to donate books in her name as well.  She was an incredible champion of children's literacy.  She organized reading volunteers to come in from the community and help the kids read, set up reading challenges with neighboring schools, and even lead a project to paint the school's library to look like a bejeweled castle.  Amazing.  When she passed, the family requested donations be made to the school library in her honor.  So now the Girls With Opinions book club will participate in this effort as well.  Because donations to school libraries are complicated (they need to be a special binding, outfitted with barcodes, etc.), school libraries don't often accept book donations.  However, there are many teachers at the school who have classroom libraries that could use some new material.  I asked the school librarian to suggest a teacher (of an appropriate grade level for our books) that might like a set.  This will benefit the children of Sinclair and allow us to donate our special books ;)

I spent far too much time looking on Etsy for the perfect stamp to mark the donated books as well as the ones that will remain in our collection.  I had about 20 contenders, but I kept coming back to Magnolia Letter Arts.  After I placed the order I learned the shop owner and her mom are both reading teachers.  So cool.  

I don't know about anyone else, but I was all about finding treasures/secrets/secret clubs as a kid.  I can imagine in my mind's eye how fun it will be for the kids who pick one of our books off the shelf, to find this stamp on the inside cover:

I will bring the stamp and a stamp pad to each meeting and the girls can stamp their books if they wish.  All our books donated to classroom libraries will be stamped.  Sinclair school classroom library donations will be stamped along with a message "donated in honor of Terisa Billingsley." 

I so wish I could share this idea with Terisa.  I know she would giggle like a school girl about how cute and fun it will be for the kids to find inside.  

The Night Fairy- meeting #2

Our second book was THE NIGHT FAIRY by Laura Amy Schlitz.  This book was a hit.  Two girls gave it a thumbs to the side, but most gave it a thumbs up.  

We used our general book club discussion questions as well as some of these that came from a word document I found online at Indiana Library Federation's website:  

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Describe the life cycle of a fairy. 

2. Why did Flory, the night fairy, decide to be a day fairy?  What are her challenges?

3. Why do you think Flory is willing to help Skuggle get food?

4. What does Flory seem to admire about the hummingbird?  Why do you think this?

5. Discuss the growing relationship that develops between Flory and Skuggle.  How can you compare this to a friendship you developed?

6. Why do you think it might be bad luck to kill a fairy?

7. Flory developed several good friends.  Which friendships do you think will continue to grow?  Why do you think this?

The mom who hosted the meeting had a nice spread of veggies and fruit to snack on, chicken nuggets, and cupcakes with fairy cupcake toppers.  She found a fairy wall decal at the dollar store and put it on the wall to add some fairy magic to the room.  

After the book discussion, the girls made fairy houses.  In the story, Flory lives inside a bird house when she has to become a day fairy after the loss of her wings.  I found little paper mache bird houses at Hobby Lobby.  They are usually 99 cents but were on sale for 30% off making them roughly 70 cents each.   A word to the wise-  if you have a lot of girls in your club, make sure to buy them early.  I need six of them and the store I went to only had 5.  I got those, and then went back a week later and got the last one (this time there were only 2 at the store).  Don't wait until the last minute.  It seems they are never heavily stocked.

Paper mache bird house at HOBBY LOBBY

At the previous book club meeting, I let the girls look through my acrylic paint and had them choose the color they wanted for their fairy houses.  I wrote down their names and the color they chose.  Before this meeting I prepainted the houses so they were ready to go.  I used some sticky avery labels with their name on them to go around the loop at the top.  This kept the loop from getting stuck in the paint while painting and allowed me to know whose house was whose without writing on the actual house.

At the meeting, we put out foam stickers, jewels, sticky scrapbook letters, shells, puff balls, glue, and other things for them to decorate their houses. 

One mom brought some glue dots that really saved the day.  They worked on some of the items that would traditionally need hot glue, and the girls could use them themselves rather than ask an adult to hot glue for them.  

Hard at work

The finished products

 

a close up

 The host mama had one last craft- an acorn dessert.  The night fairies are 1 acorn high when they are born and at the end of the book, Flory is 2 acorns high.  So the girls made acorns from mini Nilla wafers, Hershey's kisses, and chocolate icing.  You use the chocolate icing to stick the hershey's kiss to the nilla wafer and then dab a little icing on the top to look like the stem. 

yummy acorns

I gave the bottle cap buttons out, and the girls added their NIGHT FAIRY button to their lanyard.  

IMAGES FOR THE NIGHT FAIRY BUTTONS

The second GIRLS WITH OPINIONS book club meeting was a success.  The girls are excited to read the next book TURTLE IN PARADISE for February's meeting.