Monica Edinger's Blog, page 46

In the Classroom: Parents and Teachers and Children and Homework

I have never been much for homework. Nothing I’ve read indicates it does anything to improve student learning for the 4th graders I teach. I do require that my students read a minimum of 30 minutes a night, but I try to keep their accountability for that as simple as possible so that the reading doesn’t become a chore. We also give them a small amount of math to reinforce what they did in school, a bit of word study, and that is pretty much it. What I hope they do away from school is whatever...

Jude Watson’s Loot

I love me a good caper story. Lighter, smarter, funnier, and a lot less gory than many other sorts of crime fiction, done well, they are greatfun to read. And whena heist is involved, ideally insome exotic locale, all the better. I’m not an expert by any means, but my favorite of these sorts of stories involve some sort of initiating event and then a super cool and super smart individual assembling and leading a motley crew to steal something from someone who doesn’t deserve to have it in the...

Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey

I read Val McDermid’sreinvisioning of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey a while ago, courtesyof one of the egalley sites, and very muchenjoyed it. This surprised me becauseAusten’s original is perhaps my least favorite of her novels, butMcDermid pulls this new version off glowingly.

First of all, a well-known writer of adult crime fiction, McDermid does an excellent job with her sentence-level writing — that light wit and cleverness of Austen is nicely channelled. Having read a number of mediocre...

Summer Reading Suggestions from My Fourth Graders

Well, they won’t be “my” fourth graders after tomorrow. That is when we have our annual Arch Day when students go through an arch “and into the next grade.” That said, today they are still fourth graders, great readers who, when I asked for some summer reading suggestions for their peers, had a great time.

The rules were the suggestions had to come from their independent reading choices; that meant they couldn’t list books I’d read to them or others they’d read for class projects. Being avid r...

Bank Street College’s Best Children’s Books of the Year

Bank Street College Center for Children’s Literature‘s 2014 edition of theirBest Children’s Books of the Year is now out. Here’s adescription from their announcement:

The Best Children’s Books of the Year, 2014 Editionincludes more than 600 titles chosen by theChildren’s Book Committeeas the best of the best published in 2013. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books...

New Trailer for The Giver Movie

This one (unlike the first one) addressescolor as per the book. Whew.

Reinventing the Bookstore

When online shopping offers choice, convenience and competitive prices, why would anyone go to an actual shop? To try on clothes, perhaps. To sit on sofas or lie on beds. But if you’re after music, film or books, you’re more likely to go straight to the internet. In the digital age, bricks-and-mortar shops have to work much harder to attract our attention, let alone custom. Brands rip out and refit their stores every few years: interior design is, clearly, already crucial to their fortunes. B...

A Few BEA Moments

While I did not make it to theJavits itself this year to participate in the heady event that isBookExpo (nor will I get there today for the associatedBook Con),I did make it to some related events. (Warning: lots of name dropping and gushing follows.)

On Tuesday I went to Candlewick’s preview and got very excited with their enthusiastic presentation of their fall books. One faux pas on my part: whensome Toon Booksbooks were passed out for us to look at whileFrançoise Mouly spoke about them, I...

Coming Soon: Gregory Maguire’s Egg & Spoon

Gregory Maguire’s Egg & Spoon is arich and layered story, full of gorgeous images and sentences, a matryoshka doll sort of tale. That is, like those nested dolls that show upthemselves in the story, this book involves bits and pieces of stories, one inside the other and then coming out again. We begin meeting Elana Rudina, a peasant girl starving in a village with a dead father, a dying mother, a brother taken off to serve the Tsar, and the other as a servant for the local landowner. One day,...

An Interstitial Moment: Pig not Fig

I am a lousy speller even in the best of times, but on a small Iphone with autocorrect my poor spelling and poor typing results in many errors. It is particularly vexing with twitter because tweets are so ephemeral and not easily corrected. Yesterday I made one that gave me, a Lewis Carroll fan, some amusement. I was tweeting away at Candlewick’s fall preview when I did this one:

The correct title is Sam and David Dig a Holeand so first of all, myapologies to Candlewick, Mac Barnett, and Jon K...