Coretta Scott King Book Award

Since 1970 African American authors who have excelled in writing have been awarded the Coretta Scott King book award.  Outstanding African American illustrators began being recognized in 1974.  The first author to win the award was Lillie Patterson for the book Martin Luther King: A Man of Peace.  The first illustrator was George Ford for the Book Ray Charles (written by Sharon Bell Mathis)

The Coretta Scott King Author Award for this year goes to Rita Williams-Garcia.  Williams-Garcia also won the award in 2014 for P.S. Be Eleven and in 2011 for One Crazy Summer.  Her latest book Gone Crazy in Alabama has been award with the 2016 award.

Gone Crazy in Alabama is the sequel to One Crazy Summer. In Gone Crazy in Alabama Delphine and her two younger sisters are shipped of to Alabama for the summer to live with their grandmother and great grandmother.  Rural Alabama in 1969 is much different than Brooklyn.  The girls struggle with finding their identify, getting along and learning the difference between oppression and respect.

All sisters can relate to the three sisters in the story (oldest, middle and youngest) Delphine is the big sister, in charge of looking after her younger sisters.  She takes her job a little too seriously, constantly picking on them to do right.  However, she thinks that she is above helping out around the house (especially ironing sheets) and tells her grandmother that she will not do it.  This act of disrespect does not sit well with her grandmother. Over the summer Delphine learns a lot about what it means to be a big sister and just how much her sisters mean to her.

Vonetta is the outspoken middle sister.  She is always picking on her little sister and getting bossed around by her big sister.  She doesn't take it from anyone.  Vonetta loves being the center of attention and will do anything to stay there.  Her favorite thing to do during the summer in Alabama was take stories back and forth between her great grandmother and her estranged sister Great Aunt Miss Trotter.  Vonetta is so stubborn and bull-headed she finds herself in trouble when a tornado hits the town.

Fern, the baby, does not like to eat meat.  She wants to take care of all her animals friends.  She is constantly being picked on by Vonetta and being defended by Delphine.  Fern is just a happy go lucky girl until her sister Vonetta turns up missing- or possibly worse.

All three girls learn, that even through all the fighting and bickering, they are still sisters and still love one another.

Now, in addition to the author and illustrator award, the ALA also recognizes new authors and illustrators with the Steptoe award.

This year's Coretta Scott King Steptoe award for new author goes to Ronald L. Smith for his book Hoodoo.  Hoodoo is the story of a boy growing up in the south in the 1930's.  The boy, Hoodoo, comes from a family who does hoodoo magik, although he has never been able to.  One day a stranger comes to town and Hoodoo can feel the bad juju.  The bad juju is showing up in his dreams and in real life.  Hoodoo quickly realizes that there is evil in the world that only he can conquer.  He digs as deep as he can inside himself for bravery and belief in the hoodoo magik to conquer the evil.

Hoodoo is an intense slightly scary novel.  Smith does a great job with describing the scene, everything from the look and feel right down the the smell.  He sets the scene brilliantly, the entire time you feel as though you are in 1930 Alabama from the way that the characters talk to what they are eating.  If your intermediate aged child likes magic and spells and can be scared a little this book is perfect for them!

Happy Reading!
Laura

Stupid Fast Continued

As promised I have gone through the 8th grade common core standards and listed the ones I think Stupid Fast could be used with. Like I said I am not familiar with 8th grade standards but just by looking through them here are the ones I think this book touches on.

Standards

RL.8.2: Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to characters, setting and plot.

- As I mentioned yesterday there are several themes in Stupid Fast.  You could use just one for the students to analyze or they could each pick their own. 

RL.8.3: Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character or provoke a decision.

- There is a lot of dialogue is the book.  Felton even has a lot of inner dialogue that propels action forward.  It would be interesting to analyze his inner dialogue and how it impacts his actions.

You could also use these standards to meet the following writing standard:

W.8.9: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection and research
           a. Apply grade 8 Reading Standrads to literature.

There are a lot of tough topics presented in the book Stupid Fast (suicide, puberty, peer groups etc.)  any of these topics could be used to meet almost all of the Speaking and Listening standards through either a debate or a class discussion.  This could be a great way to incorporate the Global Read Aloud project and connect with another class to debate/discuss these issues.

Ideas

I lastly wanted to leave you with some ideas that you could implement in your classroom while reading aloud this book.  A lot of my suggestions came from the book Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffery D. Wilhelm.  This book has great idea for introducing enactments into your classroom.  Through the enactments higher level learning will occur.  Here are a couple I think work well with Stupid Fast. 

Hotseat:  In this enactment a student assumes the role of a character in the book.  The student is given time to tell about him or herself and then answers questions or responds to situations that the rest of the class propose.  In the book Wilhelm suggests that you prepare students to be the "lifeline" of the person in the hot seat and as always he says it is OK to stop the enactment to reflect upon responses and if they are accurate or not.

Who Am I?:  Basically students pick a character from the story.  The begin by acting or miming like the  character then they will move on to speaking like the character.

Character Surveys:  After reading assign each student a character and have them complete a survey.  They have to justify their answers as a the assigned character would.  Here is an example from Wilhelm's book:

1. Love means never having to say you're sorry.
In role as Romeo.  I totally disagree with this statement  Love made me do a lot of things that made me really sorry.  I am dead and so is Juliet.

The explanation goes on but I think that you get the point.

How fun would these enactments be when using technology to connect with another class.

My last idea is for students to use technology to make a book trailer (just like a movie trailer but with a book).  Here is one that a librarian made for Stupid Fast. 

Hope this post helped a little!

Happy Reading!
Laura

Stupid Fast

Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach is the suggested book for grades 8 and above for the Global Read Aloud project.  I do not know a lot about 8th grade and above content but I am going to do my best to summarize the book, suggest some Common Core standards that the book addresses and end with some activities that you could do with other classrooms either through twitter, blogs or Skype.  Today, I will start with the summary.

I would describe Stupid Fast as a coming of age novel.  The main character, Felton Reinstein is going through puberty and he has hit his growth spurt fast.  Before his growth spurt Felton was your average nobody in school.  He lived with his mom and younger brother (his dad had committed suicide when he was 5). Felton only had a couple of friends, was often made fun of and had nicknames like Squirrel Nuts and Rein Stone. Then he became fast, really fast, or as the author might say, stupid fast.  He went out for the track team and really enjoyed running until he got disqualified at regionals.  Then it was summer.  Over the course of the summer Felton grew even more, his best friend left for Venezuela and his mom started going crazy.  Through out the book Felton is learning how to deal with finding out who he is and what he is good at doing.  He is also struggling with his confidence and self-esteem (which any teenager can relate to).  He decides to try out for the football team, mostly so he can get out of the house away from his mom and brother and also meets a girl.

As Felton beings working out, making friends and getting faster Felton's mom is getting crazier and crazier.  She will not buy groceries, clean the house or even get out of bed.  Felton wants to hide this from everyone because he is finally making friends and becoming likable.  To cope with all the issues going on in his head he begins running, and this is where he truly comes to peace with himself and what is going on, until his mom tells him something that makes him hit rock bottom.  Lucky for Felton he has friends and family that love and support him during this hard time.

This is a great book to read aloud for 8th grade and above because it is written in first person and Felton has great voice.  You really catch onto his personality and his quirks because Herbach does such a great job developing him.  Also, the themes are abundant in this book.  Everything from you won't be happy until you find what makes you happy to themes around friends and family.  It would be interesting to see what 8th graders pick out as themes of this novel.  Be aware, there is some offensive language in this book so if that is a problem in your classroom you might want to steer away from this novel.

Mostly, because I didn't want the post to be too long I am going to stop with just the summary today.  Tomorrow, check out what standards can be taught using this book.

Have a great Friday and Happy Reading!
Laura