Andrea Davis Pinkney comes to MSMC

Everyone in my class had to pick an author to research and be them for a class. People were Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, Beverly Cleary and many others. I chose to be Andrea Davis Pinkney. She is an incredible writer who had one many awards.She was born September 25, 1963 in Washington D.C.
Her parents were involved in the civil rights movement, and she became very interested in this topic.
However she aspired to write for magazines because of the Mary Tyler Moore Show;
Mary Richards was a big-city journalist and she wanted to be that too. She majored in journalism
at the University of Syracuse 1985 and became the Senior editor for Essence Magazine. She 

switched to childrens books with encouragement from her husband Brian (children's book editor). His mom was a writer and his father was an illustrator. She noticed the lack of African-American literature geared toward and available to children so she decided to create something that would operate around their cultural norms and morals, something that would reflect their lives, their cultural heritage, and the achievements of African-American figures.  She did just that and became an award winning author. This video is amazing take a look!!! She also wrote a book because she was inspired by her son.

This book one the Corretta Scott King Award in 2013! She has many other books take a look at the link above. 

I enjoyed being her for a little while and teaching everyone about her, and all of her accomplishments!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abN2aP_Dzd0




I think that these author presentations were a great idea. We really got the chance to learn about how people became writers/illustrators, and their struggles along the way.
Here is what my classmates had to say about my presentation:

3 Pluses

1. I liked how you did not read off of the slide presentation.

2. I liked how you gave us an age range for your books. 

3. I like how you wanted to do a multicultural author and just because it was difficult to research her you did not switch who you did. 

1 Wish

1. I wish the technology would work in our room! 

Denise,

1. Improve was done very well! You weren't even frustrated when the technology didn't work. 

2.  Good resources for more information! Excited about the "Red Pencil"

3. You did a nice job with the information you had. It's tough when there isn't a lot of resources out there.

Wish: A sneak peek from the"Red Pencil!"

Three Pluses

1. I liked how you chose a multi-cultural author.
2. It was great that you had so many books to show us.
3.  I am looking forward to reading your new book, The Red Pencil.

One wish

      - To hear more about the The Red Pencil - sounds like a wonderful book!

Pinkney, A., & Pinkney, J. (n.d.). Hand in hand: Ten Black men who changed America.

Pinkney, A., & Pinkney, J. (2010). Sit-in: How four friends stood up by sitting down. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Who Was ....

I love learning about people. I like to read biographies. I stumbled upon the series called Who was.. while I was student teaching. All the students had a different person and the books were really student friendly. It explained difficult things these people went through in such great ways. One of my favorites was Amelia Earhart. The student took such interest in her that she went to the library and took out other books and also researched her online. As I went to my other placement they were using these books as well. I have even started my own collection.

 Memoirs are other books I enjoy. A memoir is facts and events from a persons life are arranged to construct a theme or personality.One of my favorites is The diary of a young girl.   It is by Anne Frank, who wrote the diary while she was in hiding with her family. 

With the Common Core standards students in grades 3 and 4 are leaning about biographies, 

Frank, A. (1992). Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Globe Book.
Stewart, W., & Harrison, N. (2009). Who was Walt Disney? New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

Kelly Going visit

Kelly Going came to our college today to discuss her books. She was fantastic. She read some of her material that she has written along with telling us her story. She started off not wanting to be a writer but she started working for a publishing company and things fell into place after a few years. She was very nice and personable. She seemed very interested in the teaching aspect of books, and what and how to use books in the classroom. I liked how she was down to earth and thanked us for letting her come. I enjoyed hearing her story about how she fell into this career.

She is also from this area which I thought was cool. . Her first novel was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association in 2004. Her books have won many honors and awards. 

• Booksense picks, 
• Scholastic Book Club choices, 
• Junior Library Guild selections, .

 They have been featured by Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Kirkus, and Children's Book Council as Best Books of the Year. Her first novel, Fat Kid Rules the World was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Past Decade in 2005 by the Young Adult Library Services Association. Adapted into an independent film, it was named Audience Award winner at the SXSW Film Festival in 2012. This book however was very controversial among many people and was even banned in some libraries. You can follow her on her blog !!


She began writing novels in college and has since published novels for young adults and middle grade readers, a picture book, and a reference book titled Writing and Selling the YA Novel published by Writer's Digest. She has also written short stories for several anthologies and currently has multiple books under contract. Her work has been published in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the UK.

She brought some of her books for us to buy at a discounted rate and signed them for us. She is truly an inspiration. 

 These are the ones I bought !








All of these pictures and videos can be found on her website
I just finished reading the book Saint Iggy. I think it would be really good for a middle school / high school student to read. It talks a lot about drugs and how his friend does them and is into trouble with a drug dealer which students might be able to relate toI also related to it since my parents did drugs while I was in high school, and Iggy's parents were also both drug addicts. Its a hard life but if you want to get out of it then you have to take steps in the right direction which he tries to do. I really enjoyed reading this!!

Going, K. (2003). Fat kid rules the world. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Going, K. (2005). The liberation of Gabriel King. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Going, K. (2006). Saint Iggy. Orlando: Harcourt.

History in the making

      Historical fiction tells the stories of history; it consists of imaginative stories grounded in the facts of our past. It is realistic- the events could have occurred, and the people portrayed could have lived - but it is a fictional story.In order for a book to be labeled Historical Fiction it must be an event from at least 20 years earlier. 

Some requirements for  historical fiction:

• Don'd add too much historical background
• Remember your Recreating the historical period
• Making credible dialogues and using language suited to the historical time.
• View all opinions 

Reading historical fiction is one way to broaden our horizons, to learn more about the people and places of our world by reading about the past. Another important reason is to learn to avoid making the mistakes of the past. Its like that quote by Karl Marx History repeats itself, first as a tragedy second as a farce. By reading Historical fiction we can hope not to make the same mistakes again, as humans and as a society. In a classroom teachers can start using Historical Fiction early on. They can use books on slavery, wars, and more. The industrial revolution is a good one to use as well. The students can use their textbooks to look up information since it provides facts. Historical fiction is very important to teach in classrooms and you would be surprised at how interested the students become during lessons.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth. Gao Xingjian

 Devon and I did our genre presentation on Contemporary Realistic Fiction. As we were learning about CRF we found that it generally follows specific criteria to be a CRF book. Here is our PowerPoint presentation we came up with to kind of summarize what we read. Its basically real life situations in fictional settings. Some common .themes are coming of age, family relationships/problems, peer pressure and even cultural tensions. It is something that people can relate to and might be dealing with in their own lives. The characters in these books are humans as well. Some types of books for CRF can be picture books, chapter books, novel in verse, graphic novels, short stories and more. Some books that you can read are here. We also did a readers theater activity with the class that was fun, and also a jeopardy like game on the Smartboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0_NomwHlc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Wimpy_Kid

Here's what our classmates had to say about our presentation:

Hi girls, I loved your presentation!

First plus--> I like that you read the book first to have us realize that acting it out was more fun and meaningful.

Second plus--> Your examples and non examples were excellent. Very comical as well!

Third plus-->Readers theater with props was tons of fun! I really enjoyed the idea

One wish--> Over all you did an amazing job and I learned a great amount. I think it would be beneficial to have more copies for the readers theater but that is all. Thank you for your presentation it was great!

Three Pluses:

1.) Your powerpoint was clear with interesting pictures to help me understand.

2.) The reader's theatre let me act and have fun with the dialogue.

3.) The Smartnotebook quiz was a great way to assess student understanding.

Wish: It would be great if the college had Senteos for us to use with working Smartboard technology :)

3 likes and a wish

1. I like that you gave examples and non-examples in your powerpoint using cows

2. I like that you had us do the readers theater it was interactive and fun.

3. I like the quiz that you had us do at the end to wrap up the information

1 wish

I wish the quiz actually worked :-(




DiCamillo, K. (2000). Because of Winn-Dixie. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press
Kinney, J. (2007). Diary of a wimpy kid: Greg Heffley's journal. New York: Amulet Books.

Visit by Chuck Stead

Chick Stead a local story teller came to speak with our class and other today. He told stories of him as a young boy and all about his family. He is from the Ramapo tribe in New York and is quite the leader. Walter Chuck Stead has led the long fight for cleanup of a major Superfund site in New York’s Torne Valley. But he’s done much more than that. He has documented the region’s history, helped give a voice to the area’s indigenous people,  and built an environmental education center to teach future generations. 
He is a teacher at Cornell cooperative ext and has been working to rebuild the salt box that he can use with his students.When the project is complete, the Saltbox will be the home of the Ramapo Saltbox Environmental Research Center (ERC), a field research center designed  to examine the long-range impact of paint sludge contamination, the result of Ford Motor Company's dumping during the 1960’s and 70’s.  He is very passionate when he speaks and I really enjoyed learning about the damage that Ford did back in the 1960s and how they are finally forced to take some sort of responsibility for it. Here are some video's of him from you tube; there are lots more check them out He is great!!

The video's were taken from youtube.

Tuck Everlasting

Today we discussed the book Tuck Everlasting in class. We got to make an animoto that we created on the motifs in the book. We decided that the most common motif was fantasy. This book is a fantastical literature book. It is based off events that cant really happen. We added pictures to our animoto and then added captions.

Dr. Smirnova started the class with 2 puppets today. It definitely gained our attention, and got us engaged. We presented our animotos and used the puppets as well. Puppets are a great way to start a class especially with young children. The following link on Puppets provides many resources on how to use puppets and why they are important.

We also had 3 authors that came into our class. 

Jodi Picoult

Barbara Helen Berger

Kevin Henkes