Grade 4 will have a chance this week to create "blackout poems," a form created by poet Austin Kleon (video interview below). We will work with pages from discarded books. To create a blackout poem, the poet selects words from a page of text and "blacks out" the rest of the page with a black marker. It's not as easy as it sounds: choosing words that work together takes real thought, but it can yield some wonderful poems.
Winners have been announced for the contests in which we've been participating this year: The winner of the California Young Reader Medal in the Primary category is The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Dawalt; and in the Picture Books for Older Readers category, the winner is Helen's Big World: The Life of Helen Keller, by Doreen Rapaport. The winner of the Cook Prize is Mesmerized: How Ben Franklin Solved a Mystery that Baffled All of France, by Mara Rockliff.
The district summer pleasure reading lists have been posted on the MBUSD website. Look under the tab for Students or the tab for Parents--you should see Summer Reading Lists. The lists for grades 1 and 2, grade 3, and for grades 4 and 5 are OPTIONAL. Students entering grade 6 and up in our district do have reading requirements, which are spelled out on the lists for those grades. It looks like the list for entering 6th-graders is still being revised--please check back for that one after May 27.