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!

Over the past weeks of safer-at-home we've had an opportunity to experience our homes and neighborhoods in different ways. Our houses have taken on the activities of schoolrooms, tech centers, art studios and music venues, gyms and sports fields, movie theaters, restaurants, bakeries, and cafés. Our neighborhoods are where we stretch our legs and see other people--even though six feet apart and behind masks. This was not a bike-friendly neighborhood before, but it is now. As I walk in the afternoons I hear far more children playing in backyards than I used to. Small gestures like chalked sidewalks combat isolation. It's fair to say we know our homes and our neighborhood better than we did before. For me anyway, I feel even more grateful for both, and more attuned to how these places sustain individuals, families, and our shared community.

I hope you enjoy this week's theme: houses, neighborhoods, and architecture. Be sure to click over to the Weekly Readalouds to view this week's selection of recorded readings. Click on the images below to check out these ebooks from the County of Los Angeles public library. And grownups especially, I invite you to take a look at these beautiful maps of neighborhoods during safer-at-home (without a doubt my favorite article I've read about this unusual time). See you (distantly, behind masks) around the neighborhood!

In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month I'm reading a beautifully illustrated new picture book: Tiny Feet Between the Mountains, by Hanna Cha. According to the author's note, the story draws upon Korean reverence for tigers. "Tigers constantly appeared in Korean stories and images, sometimes as deities, sometimes as threats," says the author. In the story, a little girl named Soe-In packs her belongings in a "bojagi" and bravely heads out to confront a dangerous situation. I got to wondering, what is a bojagi? Turns out it is a lovely, environment-friendly style of wrapping possessions or gifts in cloth, similar to Japanese "furoshiki." The video below mine offers an example of Korean bojagi wrapping, if you'd like to learn how it's done.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. With continued social distancing, it's a good thing there are a lot of online resources to learn about and honor the people and cultures of this region. Start with this page, which is a gateway to a lot of resources at the Library of Congress, National Archives, Smithsonian Institution, and other entities under the federal government's umbrella. The County of Los Angeles public library has a lot of things going on, so find out about those events here. I like the Reading Rockets site because it has a lot of very specific "Themed Booklists" for interests and events, such as "Celebrating Asian Pacific Heritage" and, further, there are usually links built in that show where to borrow or buy the books. And right here are books in the County of LA public library's digital books collection that are available for immediate checkout (unless someone else got there first--in that case you can place a hold). Click on the images below to go to that book's catalog record. You do need a library card and PIN to check the books out. If you don't have a card, you can get an Instant Digital Card. And head over to the Weekly Readalouds page to see video readalouds for each grade. The grade levels on these are pretty fluid--anyone could really watch any of them!