Picture Book 10 for 10 2018!

I love this day! Last year it the first day back to work in my district and I missed posting. Luckily my list for this year has been set since the end of June. I was a participant in a district course offering about diverse text sets. Being the only elementary participant amongst middle and high school teachers, I needed to get creative with my end project since the others would be pairing up chapter books for their content area courses. 

This fall I will be switching grade levels and moving down to teach kindergarten. I decided to take the concept of identity and curate titles to reflect different the identity concepts we explore at the start of the year: personal characteristics, name and family.  To guide my thinking, I used the Teaching Tolerance Framework and the Ohio Curriculum Standards. Please follow this link to my project presentation to see my list of picture books, a few chapter books and some of the teaching paths I plan to take with these titles. 

Identity Text Set

Nonfiction 10 for 10 2018

I love reading books with my students and nonfiction is one of my favorite genres to share with them. We always learn together and grow ourselves with the questions and wonders that remain after the cover is closed. I didn't use a theme or special qualifier for picking my titles. These books just happened to pop into my head when thinking about recent nonfiction we've read and learned from as a class this year in second grade.  Here are my titles for today's 2018 Nonfiction 10 for 10:

  

This biography about Grace Hopper and the biography about Margaret Hamilton were both a big part of my Hour of Code week. Both opened the eyes of my second grade students to the role of women in computer science and the hugecontribution both had to making our daily technology accessible to us. 

This a new book we investigate for our Mock Caldecott research. Jason Chin is a favorite of mine and the illustrations and information are amazing. If you've every visited the Grand Canyon, you need to read this book. If you ever want to visit, you need to read this book!

Both of these titles are by a new favorite author, Katherine Foy. Here illustrations are absolutely stunning and she's able to make the very graphic aspects of nature and the cycle of life understandable without being too scary for young students.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book. My students and I had so much fun learning about animals  - some unknown to us and some surprising facts about a few animals we are very familiar with. 

This is a great biography with a very intriguing twist. The illustrations are unique and contribute much to the telling of the story.

In the fall a mother of a student in my class brought her AP Envio. Science students to dissect owl pellets. We used this book to learn more about owls. 

I've used No Monkeys, No Chocolate for several years and the students always love learning about the relationship between monkeys and chocolate. This year I added Zoom In On Butterflies as a nonfiction title while we observed a Monarch butterfly go through its life cycle.