Friday Night at the Movies on Primrose

Well, I see that this is a very small shot of the poster for The Pacifier, but it will have to do.


I'm not sure who recommended this to me, but I got it on Netflix and then wondered if I'd be sorry. It may not be "great art," but it was certainly entertaining.

Not bad for a Friday night movie at home. And clean - no sex or profanity and the violence was pretty low key. (Seems oxymoronic to say that violence is low key. But it was more like the violence in the very old Batman movies from the '70s.)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. It was a recommendation from a friend and I loved it! It is set in England and it is a mystery, so I guess there is not much of a surprise that I enjoyed it. Flavia de Luce is the almost eleven year old that is busy solving mysteries at the family's ancient country house. She quickly became a favorite literary character. And the best part is that there is a sequel. Can't wait to read it!

At least it's worth AR points

This is a Newbery Honor Book - but I didn't find it all that great. For one thing, it moves ponderously - a death sentence as far as I'm concerned. There were long passages where legends were told - and I ended up skipping most of them.

The basic story had some merit, but the ending was precipitous - and not even very clear. There is a sequel, but I think I will skip it.

We use the Accelerated Reader program at our school - students read books, take quizzes and earn points. Mr. McClure and I decided we wanted to compete, so Mrs. Hoopes gave us user names and passwords, and the race is on.

Mr. McClure got a head start on me - but I plan to catch up - I have 30 points already and I just started Wednesday.

I'll keep you posted!!

An intriguing story

With all my holocaust reading, I had never come across the stories about Hitler's plans to decimate Czechoslovakia and send all the blonde, blue-eyed children to re-identification camps where they would be turned into good Germans!

This story, though fiction, is based on facts - and the facts are pretty amazing. Children taken from parents and literally turned into someone else - and then adopted by good German families - who vowed to raise them to help perpetuate the "master race."

It's a chilling concept. The story is for adolescents - it is written in a simple, straightforward way - but I enjoyed reading it. The story line alone was compelling; other aspects of the story were secondary.

Undoubtedly there are as many stories out there as there are individuals to tell them.

A quick read

I'm not really a fan of the supernatural, but this book caught my eye at our recent book fair at school. I picked it up, but it sat on my shelf for several weeks.

Last night I was tired, and didn't feel like doing much, so I laid down on the couch, elevated my legs, and read!!

It's a true "ghost story" and as such is sufficiently gripping to keep you reading. But I found it a bit hard to willingly "suspend disbelief!"

It will undoubtedly find fans in my classroom though!

Latest "good read!"

Every other year I do Diary of Anne Frank with my students. I can't do it every year because my classes are mixed grades, so I have to cycle through students before I can repeat. The group this year is not responding to the diary itself as well as the class did two years ago, so I have had to use a lot of supplemental materials.

They are interested in and fascinated by the Holocaust - I am always amazed at how they don't know anything about it - that fact alone disturbs me.

So I have been reading a number of other Holocaust stories, and this collection looks like a winner - as in the kids are relating to it. The book is a collection of 8 stories of real Jewish children who overcame some horrific odds to survive the brutality of Hitler. They are all Polish, and apparently they never spoke about their backgrounds until they were well into adulthood.

One woman had never spoken of it at all, but once the Civil Rights movement began, she felt she had to speak up, since the atrocities suffered by blacks reminded her of the conditions she thought she had left far behind in Poland. (Nearly all of them had emigrated to the U.S. after the war.)

Another aspect is the simplicity of the reading - the stories are told very directly, with little description - just bold facts. It works on many levels. It is very effective at grabbing the attention of my kids, the prose is easy for them to read, but it is not simplistic, just simple.

It was a quick read - and each chapter is a story in itself, so it is an easy book to put down. If you have a teenage reader who wants to find out information about the Holocaust, you could read this with them quite effectively.