Good Reads - February 2014

Divergent Series (Divergent, Insurgent, Alligent) by Veronica Roth

Oh boy.  As a card carrying member of The Hunger Games Fan Club, this series came highly recommend to me.  And since the first movie comes out soon, I figured I'd better read the first book.  Well, ten days later I had finished all three books and my kids had no clean underwear.  I love, love, loved this series.  I was hooked on the characters right away.  The premise, without giving too much away, is that a city is divided into 5 different groups that all live very differently.  At age 16, kids have to pick if they will stay in the "fraction" they were born into or switch to another.  There are twists and turns and a crazy ending (that left me pretty bummed out).  They were good and if you liked The Hunger Games, I'm sure you'd like these.

The End of Molasses Classes by Ron Clark

I'm trying to read more non fiction.  I'll be honest though, it was really hard to get into a non fiction book after reading the Divergent series.  This book is a list of things that parents and teachers can do to inspire students to go beyond the status quo.  There are a lot of great ideas.  I skimmed over the teacher section since that had more to do with teachers in a school setting, but loved the parent section.  Some really good points on the importance of letting your kids fail and what it looks like to support them through it.  If you educate kids, this is a good book to pep you up.

Josie's Read Alouds

Well, I had planned to read The Bravest Dog Ever which looked like a great, true story but when Josie saw the cover she reminded me she is terrified of wolves and I guess Balto is a little too wolf like.  So I hit the library again and we went with A Year With Ms. Agnes instead.

The Last Unicorn

A few of Josie's friends are reading The Magic Treehouse series and so I thought we'd give them a try. This one takes place in New York City in the 1930's.  Josie liked the story and I really liked how they plug true facts in throughout the story.  She really liked how many pictures there were in this book.  I am sure we will read more from the series.