Retro Book of the Week: The Pigman

The Pigman
by Paul Zindel
1968

The Pigman is one of our protected and required books for seventh grade, so I figure that it is worth a mention as a retro book of the week. This is the story of Lorraine and John, two bored teenagers with unpleasant home lives. One day, while making prank phone calls posing as a fake charity organization asking for donations, John and Lorraine meet Mr. Angelo Pignati. The two quickly become friends with Mr. Pignati, and they begin spending most of their free time at his house. Mr. Pignati becomes a father figured to John and Lorraine, and he enjoys the youthful, carefree times that the trio spends together.

However, The Pigman is, overall, a dark novel. It is a novel about loneliness, grief, pain, deceit, and betrayal. Perhaps these themes are the reason why students today can still identify with the the characters in the novel more than forty years after it was written. Many of Paul Zindel's "retro" books remain popular today. In fact, Zindel was the winner of the ALA's 2002 Margaret A. Edwards award, which "honors an author, as well as a specific body of his or her work, for significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature."

I have read The Pigman with seventh grade students, and I can say from first hand experience that this is a great choice for bringing thought-provoking discussion and real emotions to the classroom. We have both individual copies and class sets available, as well as teaching guides and an audio recording. Check it out today @your library!

Today in the Media Center

Today we are teaching Mrs. Corlette's 6th grade students all about MLA citations! We will learn about intellectual property, and that it is possible to steal ideas from people. Then we will learn how to use information in a way that respects the creator of the information.

Essential Question: Why must we cite sources that we use to find information?

Key Vocabulary: source, citation, publisher, bibliography

By the time Mrs. Corlette's student's leave the media center today, they will know why and how to cite sources of information. They will learn the five things we need to know in order to do a citation (title, author, publisher, place of publication, and date) and the three places on a book where we can find those things. It's going to be a busy day here in the media center!

This Just In...

Pictures of Hollis Woods
by Patricia Reilly Giff

25 paperbacks (with Kapco plastic covers)
1 CD
Reading Level: 6.4
Interest Level: 5-8

"Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see."

Hollis Woods is a foster child taken in by a retired art teacher, Josie. The story weaves together the stories of Hollis's growing affecting for her new caregiver and the pictures she draws of her fond memories with her previous foster family, the Regans.

Pictures of Hollis Woods was a Newberry Honor book in 2003, and was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2007. Check it out today @ your library.

Retro Book of the Week: How To Speak Politely and Why

How To Speak Politely and Why
By Munro Leaf

This book goes beyond retro. It's vintage. 1934, to be exact. Even though it is a children's book, How to Speak Politely and Why is a good book to read with middle school students. It covers the basics of being polite, such as a saying "please" and "may I." However, the book also covers good grammar. Children are taught how to use verb tenses and adverbs, and how to avoid double negatives. Munro has crafted a clever and cute book that teachers grammar in a non-threatening way.

Though students would likely not be interested in checking this book out on their own, it could be a great teaching tool. Students could create similar pages for grammar rules that they learn, or a class could compile their own kid-friendly set of grammar rules. They could also do this digitally, using a Prezi or a PhotoStory presentation. We have many books on grammar, as well as children's books, that are available for teachers to use in lesson plans -- check one out today @ your library!

[Retro Book of the Week celebrates the oldies-but-goodies in our media center. Books with faded covers can still have modern appeal! Sometimes I just want to celebrate the books that have influenced YA literature and my literary past, and sometimes I want to give new life to timeless classics. These features will be heavy on books from the 80's and 90's.]

Are You A Nerdfighter?

What is a Nerdfighter, you ask? Well, here are some definitions from around the web:

 "We're Nerdfighters. We fight against suck....we fight for awesome. We fight using our brains, our hearts, our calculators and our trombones."

"Nerdfighters are not composed of cells and tissue, but instead made entirely of awesome."

"Nerdfighters are about raising money and awareness for important causes. Nerdfighters are about building a supportive community of friends...  Nerdfighters are about stupid beautiful projects and making each other laugh and think with t-shirts and pocket protectors and rants about the situation in Pakistan which sucks right now. In the contemporary world where things fall apart and the center can not hold you have to imagine a community where there is no center... A lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.”

Nerdfighters is a community created by authors (and brothers) John Green and Hank Green. They have an amazing website that explains what it is to be a Nerdfighter, in all its many forms. John and Hank celebrate nerds, awesomeness, and decreasing WorldSuck. Basically this means that they want young people to celebrate being who they are, and they encourage people to actively work to make the world a better place.

Nerdfighters celebrate great things like Harry Potter, LOLcats, intellectual freedom, gaming, activism, humor, nostalgia, Web 2.0, and music (of all kinds). Librarians, readers, students, teachers, and authors are all joining the Nerdfighter force. Are you a Nerdfighter?

If you are interested in Nerdfighter lit, check out books by John Green, David Levithan, and Maureen Johnson...and of couse, you must read Geektastics: Stories from the Nerd Herd (featuring short stories by these three authors and many more!). Check these out and more @ your library! DFTBA*!

(*Don't Forget To Be Awesome!)

Retro Book of the Week: Dicey's Song

Dicey's Song
by Cynthia Voigt
1983

Dicey's Song is a good study in how book covers have changed over the past thirty years. I've included the covers from the 1982 First Edition, 1984, 1990, and 2002. If you look at the 1982 and 1984 covers, these are typical 80's books covers: realistic drawings done in dull colors. The 90's cover tells us absolutely nothing of what the book is about, and in fact is the least circulated edition in our collection. The 2002 cover is the most circulated, likely because it follows the more modern trend of using photographs on the book cover. But looking at any of these covers, would you really be able to tell what this book is about?

Dicey's Song won the Newberry Award in 1983, and it is actually a pretty popular story with our students that actually pick the book up and read it. It was on the Battle of the Books list last year, and I had many students tell me how surprised they were that it was such a good book. This is the second novel in the Tillerman Cycle, a series of seven books about the four Tillerman children who are abandoned in a parking lot by their mother. In this book, Dicey and her siblings, James, Maybeth, and Sammy, are living with their Gram and attempting to adjust to normal life on their grandmother's very slim budget.

The Tillerman Cycle was a very popular series in the 80's an 90's, and we still have multiple copies of all the books on our shelf here in the library, including a class set of Dicey's Song. The books in the series include:

Homecoming (1981)

Dicey's Song (1982)

A Solitary Blue (1983)

The Runner (1985)

Come a Stranger (1986)

Sons from Afar (1987)

Seventeen Against the Dealer (1989) 

  [Retro Book of the Week celebrates the oldies-but-goodies in our media center. Books with faded covers can still have modern appeal! Sometimes I just want to celebrate the books that have influenced YA literature and my literary past, and sometimes I want to give new life to timeless classics. These features will be heavy on books from the 80's and 90's.]

The Mysterious Benedict Society

The Mysterious Benedict Society
by Trenton Lee Stewart

This is one of those books that I read and immediately wondered why it hasn't been made into a movie. Though it is a very long book (524 pages), I can't imagine why Hollywood hasn't edited it down into a fun kids movie. After all, this is a book about kids working under cover as spies to save the world from an evil genius!

Our hero in the novel is an eleven-year-old orphan named Reynie Muldoon. Reynie participates in a special test for children with special gifts, and finds out that he has been selected as a member of a The Mysterious Benedict Society. The Society is made up of four children, each selected because of his or her special gifts. Reynie is skilled in logic, and he can think outside of the box to figure his way out of any situation. Stickey Washington is a genius with a photographic memory. Kate Wetherall is my favorite: she's a tough girl who carries a bucket filled with tools that she uses, MacGyver-style, to get things done. And, finally, Constance Contraire is a tiny, stubborn girl with a set of skills that are not revealed until the end of the book.

The Mysterious Benedict Society is sent to the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, which is run by the evil, narcoleptic Ledroptha Curtain. Using logic, resourcefulness, and pure smarts they must stop Mr. Curtain from taking over the whole world using messages sent through television and radio signals. This book is perfect for upper elementary and middle school students because it is filled with puzzles and problems that readers can solve right along with the characters. The writing style and tone are similar to that of Roald Dahl, the spy action is reminiscent of the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz, and kids who like the art puzzles in Blue Balliet's books Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3, and The Calder Game will love the puzzles in this book. The Mysterious Benedict Society is highly recommended, and we are fortunate to have five copies of this book on the shelf because it is a Battle of the Books title for this year. Check it out today @ your library!