Fourth graders enjoyed hearing an old favorite, Tikki Tikki Tembo. Ask your daughter if she can recite his name. We then read Fly Away Home, a story about a boy and his father who live in an airport. This prompted an interesting sharing of ideas of homelessness. We read Frank and Ernest and matched regular food orders and their "diner names". Ask your fourth grader what a customer ordered if the cook is told to "Burn the British, cow to cover, and draw one in the dark". Next we read Martina the Beautiful Cockroach in which Martina follows her Cuban abuela's advice to evaluate her suitors by spilling coffee on their shoes. We read some lesser-known titles by very famous authors: Patricia Polacco's Mrs. Katz and Tush, about a lifelong friendship between two unlikely friends, and Robert San Souci's The Samurai's Daughter, in which a brave girl rescues her father and breaks a spell.
Soon we will have a Battle of the Books in which teams will hear a line from a book they've read this year in Library, and identify the source. We will also talk about summer reading.
