Non-fiction picture books and MacBooks

Here’s my final book talking list. It went really well. I think I’m starting to get the hang of what the fifth graders are looking for and what they’re like. (Tragic, really, that I’m almost done with my DFW, but that’s how stuff like this goes…)

After I did my book talks all the fifth graders came down to check out books. All my book-talked books got snatched up. In fact, the kids ran through the library to get to them, which is not safe or right, but still made me a little proud. I’d only talked about 12 books and there are over 30 fifth graders, so I had a lot of kids to help with readers’ advisory. Mostly they wanted books about certain animals (chameleons, cows, horses, etc.). I had book talked Teammates, which got checked out fast, but there was more demand for baseball books so I suggested Heroes of the Negro Leagues, Baseball in the Barrios, A Picture Book of Jackie Robinson, The Story of Baseball, and Who Invented the Game?.

After the fifth graders left, I helped a tenth grader tackle a technology problem. He had created a Power Point presentation on his MacBook, but in order to project the presentation he had to send it to a PC with the proper hook-ups for the projector. The trouble was, the pictures in the presentation didn’t show up on the PC version because they were TIFF files. So I looked up the problem on Google and saw it was a common one. The help page I found said to go back to the Mac and re-insert the pictures as JPEGs. So I got him going on that he fixed it in about a half an hour. As he left Lisa said, “Who are the coolest people in the school?” and he said, “Librarians.” Darn skippy.

Today Lindi and Lisa were working on a list of dystopian literature for sixth graders. They already had a pretty good list with some of my favorites on it: The Giver and City of Ember. I could only think of one more to add, but it was a good one: Feed by M.T. Anderson.

Anecdote: A couple fifth grade girls came in today to complain about the factual accuracy of a horse book. I think it’ll probably get weeded now. Such is the beauty of empowered youth.