“Worm loves Worm. ‘Let’s be married’ says Worm to Worm. ‘Yes!’ answers Worm.”
Worm Loves Worm by J. J. Austrian, illustrated by Mike Curato.
Balzer + Bray imprint, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2016.
Picture book, 28 pages.
Lexile: not yet leveled
AR Level: 2.0 (worth 0.5 points) .
Worm loves Worm. So Worm proposes. They want to be married. But then Cricket and Beetle and the rest all have their own ideas about what a wedding should look like. Will Worm and Worm ever be able to just be married?
This book got a lot of attention while marriage equality was still in the news, but the buzz has died down. Although immigration has replaced marriage equality as the hot topic of the moment, Worm Loves Worm is still a valuable addition to your library.
“School was over and the summer morning stretched ahead like a soft, sweet piece of bubble gum.” p. 1
The Buried Bones Mystery (Clubhouse Mysteries #1) by Sharon M. Draper, illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson.
Aladdin, imprint of Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, New York, 1994, my edition published in 2006.
Elementary/middle school mystery fiction, 94 pages + excerpt from book two.
Lexile: 700L
AR Level: 4.3 (worth 2.0 points)
NOTE: Previously published under the title Ziggy and the Black Dinosaurs.
Rico and his three best friends have nothing to do this summer now that the closest basketball court is ruined. So they’re going to start a club, first building a clubhouse. But then they discover a mysterious box, and something important turns up missing. What could be going on?
The Buried Bones Mystery (Clubhouse Mysteries #1) by Sharon Draper.
This book was something of a leap of faith for me. I had never read a book by Sharon Draper before, although several were on my TBR list. So many of her novels have come so highly recommended, that I went ahead and ordered this book in hardcover, sight unseen. I’m so glad, because I foresee it getting a lot of use.
This coloring book is a win on every front… except including women.
At the spur of the moment, I decided to add coloring pages to the 30 day project, mainly because this Dover Coloring book kept popping up as I added diverse books on my Amazon wish list. For us the coloring pages were a fun supplement to the main books – we usually didn’t read the text. However, if you were looking for a easier, cheaper, or simpler alternative to the 30 day project, you could certainly do a 30 day project just coloring these pages and reading them.
The kids colored the pages as I read to them. Sometimes they would race to finish first, or try to complete the page before we finished reading for the day, other times they would take their time and complete a page more slowly.
Nearly all of the pages corresponded to the “extra” picture book we were reading for the day, however occasionally we had a page that corresponded to one of our core texts, and a picture book that corresponded to the other. Z found this very confusing, so if I do this project again, I would either avoid that, or explain more clearly who was who.
I think for some of the historical figures it would also have been helpful to have a picture or portrait to look at. Some had photos or drawings in the books we were reading, but others didn’t.
Dover Coloring Book: Great African Americans
The first book I purchased was Great African Americans. This book has 45 different coloring pages representing different figures from African American history. Pages are arranged according to the person’s last name, and a wide range of people are included. Some of the poses will be familiar from photographs, and the most dynamic pages were definitely the athlete pages.
Each page has a short paragraph at the bottom giving a brief overview of the person’s life and accomplishments, so one could definitely use this book alone for a 30 day study of African American history. There were two pages which might bring up some questions parents must be prepared to answer: Marcus Garvey’s page, which discusses black separatism, and Mother Clara Hale’s page, which includes information about drug addiction and AIDs.
Of the coloring pages, there are 5 pages which have colored-in examples. Frederick Douglas is on the cover, Harriet Tubman on the inside front cover, Elijah McCoy on the inside back cover, and smaller images of W.E.B. Du Bois and George Washington Carver are on the back cover.
Out of the 45 people featured in this book, only 10 are women. After looking through the book, I quickly realized that if I wanted to include the many African American women who have contributed to American history, I would need to expand. Luckily, there is another Dover Coloring book called Famous African-American Women.
Colorful Book Reviews 