Emily Locke's Favorite Tradebooks and Resources

Recommended Children's Books (with input from second graders)

Geronimo Stilton Series by Geronimo Stilton

The Geronimo Stilton books are colorful, visual chapter books perfect for 3rd through 5th graders. The main character, Geronimo Stilton, is a mouse, working as the publisher for the Rodent's Gazette on Mouse Island. In each book, Geronimo has different adventures, but the same characters appear. The book is full of mouse puns and onomatopoeia. The book is carefully illustrated with pictures and graphic words. For example, the word "freezing" would be hand drawn with blue letters that looked like they were shivering. This gives students another way to figure out new words on their own (besides decoding, looking at the pictures, using sentence context, etc.). It is a perfect book for pulling vocabulary words out of, because it is chock full of juicy ones. Still, it is silly enough that kids will laugh out loud, and exciting enough that they will moan when it's time to stop reading. I read this book in a small reading group in second grade last year, and my students loved it.

Frindle by Andrew Clements

It was hard to choose just one book by Andrew Clements, as he is such a wonderful and fun children's book author. I chose Frindle because I just read it this summer so it is fresh in my mind, but also because one of my students read it over the summer and talked about it all the time in our penpal letters. (Yes, I was penpals with my students if they wanted to be). This book is about a boy with a terribly strict teacher, but the boy is always coming up with ways to distract and fool the teacher. The boy decides to prove a point to the teacher and gets the whole class to stop using the word "pen" and instead calling it a "frindle." This annoys the teacher to no end, but the word "frindle" catches on and soon, the whole school is using it and it becomes a big news story. Frindle is a fun read, and appropriate for 2nd through 6th graders.

Listen to the Wind by Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson is the author of the adult non-fiction novel Three Cups of Tea, the story of his attempt to climb K2 and in a turn of events, his seven week stay in an impoverished village in Pakistan. He ended up building the first school in the village, and then went on to build over 50 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He then came out with two more books based on this story, one for young adults, and this picture book for kids. The illustrations are incredible, because they are photographs of collage puppets. I was first told about this book from my young 9 year old cousin, who had just bought it at the book store and had to show it off. It is a beautiful, moving story, with incredible lessons to teach about poverty, the right to an education, and giving.

Resources for Teachers

ReadingRockets.org/books

Reading Rockets is a fantastic website for teachers, librarians, and parents. The project also includes several programs on PBS. They've already organized their lists of recommended children's books into categories (by theme, video interviews with authors, award winners, poetry, multicultural books, summer reading, holiday buying guide) as well as articles and videos on teaching kids how to read. I know that this will be one website I recommend to parents as I head into parent-teacher conferences this week.

Readers Theater for Building Fluency by Jo Worthy

Readers Theater is a fun, motivating way to get students to become more fluent and confident readers. The students work in small groups to read a script over and over until they know the words well, and then they can present the skit/play to other classmates. Readers Theater is not meant to be a big production with costumes and props, or even memorization of the lines. Rather, the students can use their scripts to read from, and pantomime minimal actions. The main point is for them to read as if they were actually talking. This book by Jo Worthy further explains the idea of Readers Theater, and has scripts that go along with children's books, as well as step by step instructions for the teacher. If you haven't tried Readers Theater in your class, I definitely recommend it! The students LOVE to do this, and they honestly beg me to practice reading when we're working on a play