Welcome back, Dragons! Although there's never been a first day of school quite like this one, I know you are as ready as ever to learn and to try your best. Let's be dauntless and forgiving as we figure this out together!

Library hours have been reduced this year due to budget constraints. Hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with distance learning from our experiences last spring. This website's content for March to June includes lots of videotaped readalouds (a few read by me but many read by other people) and links to ebooks in the County of L.A. public library collection. You can look back through those posts if you are looking for that sort of thing.

This year the school library's priority is class library "visits" on Zoom. The books I read will be listed on the Weekly Readalouds page of this site. The class Zoom schedule is posted here.

The PK library is not checking out books at this time. This policy supports physical distancing and eliminates any risk of surface contact transmission.

If you have library books from last year (and many, many students and parents do), please return them. Put your returns in the red wagon in front of the PK main office during school hours. To pay for a lost or damaged book, put the exact cost of the book (which should be on the email overdue notice) in an envelope on which is written LIBRARY and the patron's full name. Put the envelope in the PK office mail slot. Please pay in cash (exact change!) or a check to MBUSD. I am really hoping to get all the library books back.

Speaking of libraries, the County of L.A. public library continues to do a fantastic job during this challenging time. To find out about checking out physical books at our Manhattan Beach branch, click HERE. For checking out ebooks and audiobooks, click HERE. Don't have a library card? Get a digital card right now by clicking HERE.

I will miss seeing Dragon parents and caregivers, but I look forward to seeing the students and teachers on Zoom. Have a wonderful year, and keep reading!

Today's readaloud is my last one for this school year. I have chosen The Antlered Ship, written by Dashka Slater, and illustrated by the Fan Brothers.

I have read The Antlered Ship to classes at school. When I read it, I like to have a little preliminary discussion of one of the questions posed in the book: "Is it better to know what's going to happen?" wondered Marco. "Or better to be surprised?" It pleases me greatly that a majority of the students always say it's better to be surprised. I am a cautious person, prone to extensive planning. I love it that for most of the students, surprises are expected to be good :-)

Thanks for coming by the website, this year especially! I hope everyone has a good summer, and I look forward to seeing PK's students and parents in the new school year. 'Til then, happy reading!
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And suddenly, this very strange school year is ending. This is the last blog post this year with the type of themed content that has stood in for normal library visits since March 16. The theme this week is summer. Below are ebook versions of some of the books on this year's district summer pleasure reading lists. I've put the lists right here or you can link to the summer reading page on this website, where a lot of the previous years' lists can also be found. The Weekly Readalouds are either of books on the 2020 reading lists (TK, 1st, 2nd, 3rd) or of my favorite heading-into-summer picture books (K, 4th, 5th). Summer reading is not required for elementary students in our district. Students entering 6th grade at MBMS do have required reading: three books from the list (below), at least one of which must be nonfiction. So while you and your students might choose to read books not on the lists, I do hope everyone enjoys reading every single day this summer. 

The first video below is my readaloud of It Began With a Page: How Gyo Fujikawa Drew the Way, written by Kyo Maclear and illustrated by Julie Morstad. The books children read, or hear read aloud, shape how they see the world from a very early, very impressionable age. Biases are present all text, assumptions are made, and images depict selectively. This is not to say authors and illustrators are bad people with nefarious purposes! It's just unavoidable. Gyo Fujikawa is not a household name, but she was time and again a true trailblazer--attending college when few women did, traveling to develop her skills as an artist, making her way during World War II's prejudice against Japanese-Americans, and in the 1960s creating children's books with a striking difference: her illustrations were among the first to depict multiracial girls and boys playing together. Her impact on writing, illustrating, and publishing children's books continues to resonate today.
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The second video below is by two of today's brightest stars of the picture book world, Christian Robinson, illustrator, and Mac Barnett, author. During safer-at-home time, Christian Robinson has been doing a terrific series of videos he calls "Making Space." The series encourages using creativity to explore and connect while living with the boundaries of social distancing. The videos are themed on meaningful topics such as caregivers and friendship. The one I've selected (below) is on the benefits of limitations when doing creative work, and includes Mac Barnett, author of so many Pennekamp favorites. Can Christian really do a drawing in under one minute? Can Mac really write a one-sentence story? Does their tin-can telephone really work? Watch this excellent video and find out.
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This week the PK library celebrates authors and illustrators, the talented and hard-working people who make the books we love. Each of the videos on the Weekly Readalouds page is by or about an author or illustrator (or both).

I'd like to tell you about two exciting author-related events for Pennekamp students. Both of them were arranged with the help of Pages, our local independent bookstore. Id' like to give a big shout-out to Pages for supporting our school libraries in so many ways. Are you buying a book or in need of a new jigsaw puzzle? I shop at Pages. We are so lucky to have them in our town.

Last Wednesday, May 20, the 5th-grade book club Zoomed with James Ponti, author of Framed! which is the club's current selection. Framed! is a thrilling middle-grade chapter book involving the National Gallery, the FBI, a crime syndicate, and two awesome twelve-year-olds determined to solve an art-heist mystery. James Ponti was very generous with his time and very fun to talk with! He has another cool mystery series starting with City Spies--I just ordered my copy and can't wait to read it! Many thanks to James Ponti for spending time with PK's 5th-grade book club. See the trailer below for City Spies. (Doesn't it look great?!)

On Tuesday, May 26, from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., there's a very exciting, virtual book launch event for The Ocean in Your Bathtub, by Seth Fishman an award-winning author who lives right here in Manhattan Beach. Seth Fishman will introduce his brand-new book and read it aloud, and a scientist at our very own Roundhouse Aquarium will answer questions about the ocean and sea life. This is a live, virtual event. To register and receive login information, go to the event page and click on "register for the event here." The event is intended primarily for TK to 3rd-grade students, but I plan to be there! To get an idea of how cool this event is going to be, click on the book trailer below. 

Here are some ebooks about authors and illustrators that you can check out from the County of L.A. Library. If you don't have a library card (or can't find it), Instant Digital Cards are available. If the book you want is checked out, put it on hold. The hold system works well and usually isn't a super long wait.
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On Tuesday, May 26, from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., there's a very exciting, virtual book launch event for The Ocean in Your Bathtub, by Seth Fishman an award-winning author who lives right here in Manhattan Beach. Seth Fishman will introduce his brand-new book and read it aloud, and a scientist at our very own Roundhouse Aquarium will answer questions about the ocean and sea life. This is a live, virtual event. To register and receive login information, go to the event page and click on "register for the event here." The event is intended primarily for TK to 3rd-grade students, but I plan to be there! To get an idea of how cool this event is going to be, click on the book trailer below.
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Often in this space I read books that are best suited to our younger students, but this week I'm reading something suited to slightly older students--maybe 2nd- or 3rd-grade and up. How I Learned Geography, by Uri Shulevitz, is based on the author's experience during World War II, when he and his family had to flee Poland and wind up living in difficult circumstances in Turkestan. A large, colorful map becomes a window on the world for the author (then just a boy), allowing him to envision and dream about distant and beautiful places. Overall the book tells an uplifting story about getting through a tough time through the use of imagination and a "text," in this case a map. 

Beneath it is a video showing how hard it is to represent our round Earth on a flat map. As any of PK's students can attest: I show them the globe whenever I can.

Last week we focused on home and neighborhood, so this week we are going out-of-town, virtually anyway. This week's theme is places that are elsewhere and maps as representations of locations far and near.

Among the Weekly Readalouds is You Are Home: An Ode to the National Parks, written, illustrated, and read aloud by the very gifted (and very young looking) Evan Turk. I highlight it here because it's also a selection on the new 2020 MBUSD summer pleasure reading lists, which have just been posted on the district site and on this website. The lists for students entering grades 1 and 2, grade 3, and grades 4 and 5 are not required--they are just suggestions from the five MBUSD elementary library resource specialists of enjoyable books for summer reading. I hope you find them fun and helpful.
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In Too Tall Houses, Rabbit and Owl are neighbors and friends, until each wants to build a house taller than the other's. What do we want in a house, and how do our choices affect our neighbors? It's interesting to ponder the tradeoffs among height, size, stability, space, and resources. Has your family ever built a super tall Lego structure? When was the last time anyone in your family built a house of playing cards?

To see a house that's really above everyone else's, check out the video below the readaloud. I looked and looked, but I never could find an explanation of how they got it down!