The Books Kids Will Sit Still For Handout A Closer Look at Some of the Top-Rated Children's Books of 2012 and 2013 for Grades PreK-6 Compiled and written by Judy Freeman (www.JudyReadsBooks.com) Fall, 2013 The following booklist are arranged into three chapters (Easy Fiction/Picture Books, then Fiction, then Nonfiction, which includes poetry and folklore), and are then in alphabetical order by title for easy access. The list contains some of the memorable, interesting, distinguished, and award-winning titles published in 2012 and 2013. All are books I believe every teacher and librarian should know and share, whether by reading aloud, booktalking, or using with children for Literature Circles, Guided or Shared Reading, Book Clubs, or Readers Advisory. Working on your Common Core Curriculum goals? These are all books worthy of inclusion into your curriculum, your story hour, and, yes, your life. Each book entry consists of five parts: 1. BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFO: Includes title, author, illustrator, publisher and date, ISBN (International Standard Book Number), number of pages, call number (E=Easy Fiction/Picture Book; FIC=Fiction; B=Biography; #=Nonfiction), and suggested grade level range, though that is never set in stone; picture books so often can, should, must be used well beyond their intended grade levels—what I call Picture Books for All Ages. 2. ANNOTATION: To help you remember what the book’s about; to lure you into reading it alone and/or aloud; and/or to provide a meaty review that you can also use as a booktalk. 3. GERM: A good practical, do-able, useful, pithy idea, activity, or suggestion of ways to use the book for reading, writing, illustrating prompts, and other activities across the curriculum, and for story hour programs, including creative drama, Reader’s Theater, storytelling, group discussion, booktalks, games, crafts, research, and problem-solving. Your mission is to take that Germ of an idea, “germinate” or synthesize it as you see fit: nurture it, grow it, expand upon it, and incorporate it into your own lessons, programs, and story hours to make them shine. 4. RELATED TITLES LIST: A carefully compiled list of exemplary books that share the same theme, subject, style, genre, or type of characters; are by the same author; or extend the reader’s knowledge. Use these for read-alouds, thematic units, story hour tie-ins, and booktalks; for Guided Reading, Literature Circles, or Book Clubs; and for Readers Advisory to recommend to kids as wonderful follow-up reads. 5. SUBJECTS: Subject designations for each title so you can ascertain where the book might fit thematically into your curricular plan, literary program, or your life. NOTE: This handout contains listings of about three dozen exemplary titles published in 2012 and 2013. Complete listings of 100+ 2012 titles can be found in The Winners! Handbook: A Closer Look at Judy Freeman’s Top- Rated Children’s Books of 2012 (available, along with the 2011 version, directly from Judy Freeman at www.JudyReadsBooks.com); complete listings of titles from 2006-2010 in the earlier yearly versions of The Winners! Handbook (available from Libraries Unlimited, www.LU.com, or your favorite jobber). The Winners! Handbook: A Closer Look at Judy Freeman’s Top-Rated Children’s Books of 2013 will be available from Judy in May, 2014. TO FIND JUDY FREEMAN’S BER & WINNERS BOOKLISTS FROM LAST YEAR AND THIS YEAR: 1. Log in to your Follett Library Resources account (or, if you’re a teacher or librarian, open a new one) at www.titlewave.com. 2. Type JUDY FREEMAN LIST in the search bar, and you’ll see the link to both the BER list (from the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 seminars for the Bureau of Education, www.BER.org) and the Winners! Lists (from the Winners! Workshops I present across NJ each April, www.JudyReadsBooks.com). EASY FICTION / PICTURE BOOKS A Is for Musk Ox. Cabatingan, Erin. Illus. by Matthew Myers. Roaring Brook/Neal Porter, 2012. {ISBN-13: 978-1-59643-676-3; 36p.} E (Gr. PreK-2) On the first page, an aggravated-looking zebra, standing on his hind legs, points across the page to an apple core, and says, “Hey you, Musk Ox! . Did you eat that apple?” Shaggy-furred and sharp-horned Musk Ox, with bits of apple falling from his mouth, says, “Who me? I can’t remember.” Musk Ox does then admit to eating the apple from the first page of Zebra’s alphabet book, but, as he claims, “I didn’t ruin your book. I saved it. Every other alphabet book starts with ‘A is for apple.’ That’s sooo boring.” And he proceeds to explain to Zebra that A should be for musk ox, because musk oxen are awesome and they live in the arctic, which includes Alaska. At the top of each page is the next alphabet word. “B is for baby,” it says in large letters, with an accompanying picture of a bald- headed baby sucking on a pacifier. Musk Ox papers over the word “baby” with a white strip of paper reading “musk ox.” In the comical banter of the two animals, Zebra is the skeptical one and Musk Ox defends his substitutions of every word. Along the way, we pick up some alphabetical facts and opinions about musk oxen that Musk Ox claims are cool, daring, elegant, have fur, eat grass and also live in Greenland, and, for the letter H, have horns and hooves and live in herds. For kids who never heard of musk oxen before—and that’s virtually every kid—they sure won’t forget them after chanting, “___ is for musk ox!” on almost every page. The full bleed oil paintings picture the original alphabetical object (which children can identify) and expressive portraits of the two adversaries as they argue their way through the now musk ox-centric alphabet. GERM: For that lesson on fact versus opinion, have listeners decide which of Musk Ox’s pronouncements is which. Students can corroborate their answers when they do a little research on musk oxen. They can also work in small groups to research another interesting and lesser known animal of their choice, and, using the pattern established here, write and illustrate several pages on the order of “T is for Narwhal because narwhals have a very long pointy tusk or tooth that looks like a unicorn’s horn and can be eighteen feet long.” Naturally, you’ll want to pair this book with that other wacky alphabet picture book, Z Is for Moose by Kelly Bingham. RELATED TITLES: Bingham, Kelly. Z Is for Moose. Greenwillow, 2012. / Bruel, Nick. Bad Kitty. Roaring Brook, 2005. / Catalanotto, Peter. Ivan the Terrier. Atheneum, 2007. / Kalman, Maira. What Pete Ate from A-Z. Putnam, 2001. / Lichtenheld, Tom, and Ezra Fields-Meyer. E-mergency. Chronicle, 2011. / MacDonald, Suse. Alphabatics. Simon & Schuster, 1986. / Rayner, Catherine. Ernest, the Moose Who Didn’t Fit. Farrar, 2010. / Schwartz, Viviane. There Are Cats in This Book. Candlewick, 2008. / Stein, David Ezra. Interrupting Chicken. Candlewick, 2010. / Willems, Mo. Big Frog Can’t Fit In: A Pop-out Book. Hyperion, 2009. / Willems, Mo. We Are in a Book! Hyperion, 2010. SUBJECTS: ALPHABET BOOKS. ANIMALS. BEHAVIOR. BOOKS AND READING. HUMOROUS STORIES. MUSK OX. ZEBRAS. EASY FICTION / PICTURE BOOKS, cont. Ah Ha! Mack, Jeff. Illus. by the author. Chronicle, 2013. {ISBN-13: 978-1-45211-265-7; 32p.} E (Gr. PreK-1) Starting with a green frog’s contented “AAHH!” on the endpapers, where it is luxuriating in a pond, we follow its visual saga in and out of danger. Perched on a rock by the bank, the frog does not notice the brown and white dog and the barefoot child, who is holding a large glass jar. “AH HA!” thinks the dog when the boy scoops up frog in the jar. With an “AAHH!” the frog escapes and climbs another rock, only to find it is actually the shell of a hungry- looking turtle. The text consists of five words made up of only two letters of the alphabet, plus an exclamation mark—AH HA!, AAAH!, and HA HA!—encased in dialogue balloons. We root for the frog as it continues to jump in and out of danger with a crocodile and a flamingo. Full-bleed mixed-media illustrations in restful shades of light blues, greens, and browns give way to more intense colors of oranges, teals, and vivid pinks each time the frog finds itself in a new fix, and its emotions change with every page turn, from panic to jubilation. GERM: Even the youngest children will be able to follow the dialogue along with you and read each page with great expression to convey each emotion displayed in the illustration. Have children narrate this story in words the second or third time through, explaining to you why each character says “AAAH!,” “AH HA!,” or “HA HA!” If you are teaching punctuation, this book makes abundantly clear the function of the exclamation mark. Children can write and illustrate their own brief cause-and-effect stories about other animals or dangerous situations, incorporating these three words. RELATED TITLES: Charlip, Remy. Fortunately. Aladdin, 1993, c1964. / Cuyler, Margery. That's Good! That's Bad! Henry Holt, 1991. / Fleming, Candace. Oh, No!. Schwartz & Wade, 2012. / Kala, Robert. Jump, Frog, Jump. Greenwillow, 1981. / LaRochelle, David. Moo. Walker, 2013. / Mack, Jeff. Good News Bad News. Chronicle, 2012. / Numeroff, Laura. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. HarperCollins, 1985. / Rosenthal, Amy Krouse. Exclamation Mark. Chronicle, 2013. SUBJECTS: CAUSE AND EFFECT. CIRCULAR STORIES. CROCODILES. FROGS. Bully. Seeger, Laura Vaccaro. Illus. by the author.