November 2014 – Booktalking #kidlit

Polar Bears and Penguins: A Compare and Contrast Book

Polar Bears and Penguins: A Compare and Contrast Book
by Katharine Hall (Author)

Booktalk: Polar bears and penguins may like cold weather but they live at opposite ends of the Earth. What do these animals have in common and how are they different?

Snippet: Polar bears live in the Arctic, in the Northern Hemisphere…

TURN THE PAGE

…but penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere.

It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

Dino-Boarding

Dino-Boarding
by Lisa Wheeler (Author) and Barry Gott (Illustrator)

Booktalk: The dinos are grabbing some big air–come check it out!

Snippet:
Tricera leads the veggie team,
The reigning champs–the Green Machine!

The underdogs come into view.
It’s T-Rex and his Shredding Crew!

This week’s Poetry Friday Round-up is hosted by Tapestry of Words.

Benny and Penny in Lost and Found

Benny and Penny in Lost and Found
by Geoffrey Hayes (Author, Illustrator)

Booktalk: Benny’s in a foul mood! He can’t find his pirate hat, and when he sets out in the fog to find his missing hat, he leads himself and his sister Penny straight into…big trouble! (Level 2 beginning reader comic)

Snippet:

The Problem with Not Being Scared of Monsters

The Problem with Not Being Scared of Monsters
by Dan Richards (Author) and Robert Neubecker (Illustrator)

Booktalk: What’s the problem with not being scared of monsters? Well, they think you’re one of them! And then they’re too friendly, ALL the time.

Snippet:

Walking home is a drag.

Strike!: The Farm Workers’ Fight for Their Rights

Strike!: The Farm Workers’ Fight for Their Rights
by Larry Dane Brimner (Author)

Booktalk: In 1965, as the grapes in California’s Coachella Valley were ready to harvest, migrant Filipino American workers—who picked and readied the crop for shipping—negotiated a wage of $1.40 per hour, the same wage growers had agreed to pay guest workers from Mexico. But when the Filipino grape pickers moved north to Delano, in the Central Valley, and again asked for $1.40 an hour, the growers refused. The ensuing conflict set off one of the longest and most successful strikes in American history.

Snippet: The Delano grape workers wanted better wages. Growers only paid them 90 cents an hour, plus 10 cents a log, or box, of grapes picked. At the end of the day, the average picker earned about $1.20 per hour, while some other farm workers were earning more.

Nonfiction Monday

It’s Nonfiction Monday!

Bombs over Bikini: The World’s First Nuclear Disaster

Bombs over Bikini: The World’s First Nuclear Disaster
by Connie Goldsmith (Author)

Booktalk: In 1946, as part of the Cold War arms race, the US military launched a program to test nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific Ocean. From 1946 until 1958, the military detonated sixty-seven nuclear bombs over the region’s Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. The twelfth bomb, called Bravo, became the world’s first nuclear disaster. It sent a toxic cloud of radiation over Rongelap Atoll and other nearby inhabited islands.

Snippet: “I began to feel a fine powder falling all over my body and into my eyes. The coconuts changed color. By now all the trees were white, as well as my entire body. I didn’t believe this was dangerous. The powder fell all day and night over the entire atoll of Rongelap,” Moyor John Anjain later recalled.

It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

Old Manhattan Has Some Farms

Old Manhattan Has Some Farms
by Susan Lendroth (Author) and Kate Endle (Illustrator)

Booktalk: No matter where you live, you can grow food! In this new take on “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” the farmers are city dwellers and the farms consist of rooftops, empty lots, hydroponic labs, patios, and other urban nooks and crannies.

Snippet:
Spray some water here,
move an earthworm there–
pull some weeds, grab a spade.
Who’s got veggies they can trade?

http://youtu.be/oFBMm68zUcw

Find out how the author was inspired to write this book.

This week’s Poetry Friday Round-up is hosted by Keri Recommends.

Sequoyah and His Talking Leaves: A Play About the Cherokee Syllabary

Sequoyah and His Talking Leaves: A Play About the Cherokee Syllabary
by Wim Coleman (Author), Pat Perrin (Author), and Siri Weber Feeney (Illustrator)

Booktalk: Doing what no one had ever done before, Sequoyah set about creating a written Cherokee language – helping preserve the tribe’s history and culture even today.

Snippet:
Sequoyah: Why, many words use the same sounds! There are far fewer sounds then there are words! I need to discover every sound used in the Cherokee speech. Then I’ll be able to create marks for all of the sounds.

Historian 2: Many people call Sequoyah’s writing system and alphabet. Actually, it was based on the individual sounds of words, or syllables–so it was really a syllabary.