Skip to main content

Book Review AKA Backwards Book Recommendation

I love making book recommendations, but I think I like getting recommendations from others even more. I visited one of our district's Early Childhood Center (PreK & Head Start) campuses last week to take some books from my library that teachers had requested and to see if I could help them out a little since they don't have a librarian and their library is basically empty. While there, one of the bilingual teachers asked about my school's Spanish book section, which is actually pretty sad. She recommended a book called La Tortilla Corredora by Laura Herrera and illustrated by Scarlet Narciso.

I immediately grabbed it off Amazon. You see, I know a lot about books, but I don't know everything. And I certainly don't know enough about pictures books in Spanish. You know who knows about those? PreK Bilingual teachers. And if a PreK Bilingual teacher says La Tortilla Corredora is amazing, then I'm going to believe her. And I'm going to add that book to my library (and let her check it out first). 

Today, I got this in the mail. 

First of all, that tortilla is freaking hilarious. No wonder 4 year olds love this book. My Spanish isn't great, but I do live in Texas so I thought, "Let's try to read this thing. Out loud." I'm sure it was terrible, but it was fun. From my very limited Spanish, I can tell you this. A mom makes a tortilla for her kids. But the tortilla is not interested in being anyone's dinner. Much like the gingerbread boy, he runs away and encounters a series of animals intent on gobbling him up. Super cute and the illustrations cracked me up the entire time. 

A traditional story from Chile, the illustrations include native flora and fauna of the country and a glossary in the back of the book gives you more info about these. I'm pretty excited to add this to my collection at school, and do storytime with a tortilla puppet with my bilingual PreK class. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

El Deafo

Summary:  When 4 year old Cece gets meningitis, her parents are scared. But she recovers and everything seems like it is going to be just fine, until they discover that Cece has suffered permanent hearing loss. Told through a graphic novel, Cece Bell's somewhat autobiographical story stars a world of bunnies where Cece navigates her first grade year while dealing with her deafness, wearing a hearing aid and making friends. She copes by creating an alter ego for herself, "El Deafo", the hearing aid wearing superhero. In the end, Cece gains confidence and learns to be more assertive with other people who just don't understand how their interactions with her can have an effect. Strengths: This graphic novel is geared towards a younger set of readers than most of the books I will be reviewing this fall in this blog, but it still has some value and strengths for the young adult reader. The theme of dealing with being different will resonate with young adult readers,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bloom's Taxonomy for a Digital Age

Bloom's Taxonomy. One of the things we are constantly hearing in our school is the push for increased rigor in our classroom, as a result of the STAAR tests and others like it becoming more rigorous. We are told to push for higher order thinking and questioning from our students. One of the tools we use to look at how we can increase rigor is Bloom's Taxonomy. But some things about Bloom's don't translate exactly when we are talking about the digital age and the classroom or library. For example, remembering is the lowest piece of the triangle for Bloom's, but remembering looks different when you have instant access to a powerful computer that can use essentially limitless online resources to find answers. I've mentioned to my husband just how much more this and future generations will know about the world around them simply because they no longer have to remember everything they're interested in knowing. If I pass a historical marker for a place I haven...
7 comments
Read more

The Clark-Kozma Debate in the 21st Century

In the 1980s and 1990s, as educational technology was first becoming a budding field, Richard Clark published an analysis of data where he determined that the media that delivers instruction is no more than a delivery tool. He used an analogy of a truck carrying the information to the learner. He concluded that the media chosen has no effect on the learning taking place - that the instruction in the only thing that influences the learning.  In 1994, Kozma responded and prompted the current debate. Kozma states that some media have specific characteristics that do effect learning as more than a vehicle. While there is little research to support Kozma's claim, he suggests that the way the media helps shape the learning does have impact and that evaluating this impact requires more than raw data as the media and the way we use it has become more complex and nuanced. Clark has stood by his original conclusions and has even subsequently released articles further supporting his stanc...
2 comments
Read more