Geeking out over Secret Coders

For those of you who don't know, I'm a big fan of Gene Luen Yang. It seems to me that he's got a solid head on his shoulders and he writes darn good stories. I don't think I'm alone in thinking this, because he's won gobs of awards and written stories in impressive worlds like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Superman. (Yes, Gene Yang is now writing the Superman comics, and for the first time I'm interested in picking one up! haha)

Anyway, when I heard he was coming out with a series of graphic novels that would teach kids how to code, I was very excited. I emailed the publisher, and they sent me a copy for review. Huzzah!

We all loved it.

We loved it so much that we downloaded the Logo interpreter suggested in the back of the book (and linked from the website), and spent some fun times making the turtle follow our commands.

getting the hang of coding

I even caught Jacob reading it, and got some good pictures of Benjamin's work after he finished the book and before he knew we could play with this information on the computer.

 

So. Let me give you a little breakdown.

What colors is it? Interiors are black, white and green.

What is the story about? A new girl at a new, strange school, trying to solve the mysteries of her environment. She just happens to learn some basic coding, on the way.

Strong: It's definitely got emotional grab. Humor, especially between the students, Drama, in Hopper's family life, school life, and when they unexpectedly meet, hehe. I expected the bookto be a little dry at times, but I was wrong. This book isn't just "not dry," it's downright JUICY.

Weak: Nothing that I can think of! My only problem is that the rest of the series isn't out yet.

How it has changed my life: I now understand how to work in a binary number system better than I ever have before! I definitely learned about binary numbers in childhood (sister of a nerd), and in college when we covered how to teach number systems (elementary education graduate), but man! Those birds! I will not forget those birds. Also I know how to do some basic coding in Logo, which, admittedly, is not super useful in my every day life.

Here's something cool though. Watching Benjamin get really into this book and then begin to program -- to notice his errors and go back and fix them -- made me think he might be ready for piano lessons. He's seven, if you were wondering. So, Jacob and I signed him up. He's taking to piano very nicely.

I definitely recommend this book. It could be a really fun Christmas gift. Read it on Christmas morning and spend the afternoon doing a little bit of coding. Good, clean fun!

I'll make the cover image here an affiliate link, so that you can shop for the book if you like. If you shop through my affiliate links, I get a small commission.

You can check out all the books by Gene Luen Yang that I've reviewed here on Everead by clicking here.

Are your kids doing anything with coding? I've heard that some schools are starting to teach it, and Benjamin came home and played a coding game that he had played at school. Do you view coding or other computer skills as "essential skills" for the next generation? Leave me your thoughts in a comment below. 

Happy Holidays!

Hi friends! I have a billion things I want to blog about! Can you tell from the lack of recent posts that all my ideas are piling up over here?

door hanging thing, special for you!

Thing 1:
Happy Holidays! I made you a present.
Actually I made it for myself, to hang on my door, but then I accidentally left it in Boston. Not to worry, I'll make a new one.

Thing 2:
I'm now officially a freelance writer! I wrote this article for Brightly. It's about dyad reading -- my favorite strategy to help kids learn to read. You may remember that I posted about it once before. But I didn't get paid for that one, now did I? Of course, when I pointed out that I hadn't yet been paid for this piece either, my brother Ransom laughed and said I was "even more officially a free-lance writer!"

By the way, I really like Brightly. They have lots of good articles on there, not just the one by me. It's all about reading and geared toward parents, so it's pretty much right up your alley if you like those parts of Everead. :)

Thing 3:
Debra asked if I was going to do the book recommendation thing again this year? Yes. The answer is yes. If you would like a recommendation this holiday season, I am happy to oblige! You can email me, comment here, or on my facebooks or instagrams or anywhere really. If you'd like to look at the posts from 2014, here they are! Full explanation post, 2014 not-a-gift-guide.

I hope your Thanksgiving celebrations were wonderful! Feel free to leave some holiday cheer in the comments.

xo
Alysa

The Midwife of Bethlehem

Today we have a post by Ashley! Hooray!

Can you hear the distant jingling of Christmas bells yet? It's getting closer! Close enough that I don't mind posting now about this lovely children's book that was sent to me to review. It's called The Midwife of Bethlehem, written by Shad Driggs and illustrated by Diane Lucas.

Compared to many other more secularly-themed Christmas books, this one is decidedly religious. It tells the imagined story of a midwife called upon to assist Mary as she delivers Jesus in the stable in Bethlehem. The midwife contemplates beforehand what it might be like if she were to deliver the prophesied Savior. When she is summoned to this peculiar birth and sees the signs, she knows that that is just what she's been called upon to do.

The book's illustrations are simple but not distracting. The text is full of quoted scripture, which might make it a little harder to understand for younger readers. But if you're looking for a good lead-up-to-Christmas book that helps your family focus on "the reason for the season" and that will afford good opportunities for discussing Bible verses together, look no further. This one is a nice cross between reading straight out of the scriptures and reading a children's book. It'll definitely find its way under our tree for our Christmas countdown.*

Happy reading! And happy beginning to your holidays!

On a side note, if you're in holiday-season denial and need a good transition from Halloween to Thanksgiving, check out the book The Ugly Pumpkin by Dave Horowitz. It's one of our favs.

_____________

*We wrap twenty-four children's Christmas books and put them under the tree at the end of November. Starting December 1, we take turns unwrapping one each night and reading it together by the tree. These are books we own as well as library books. We just make sure we unwrap the library ones in time to return them. :)

Introducing Non-fiction November! #NFNovember

Hey! It's November!

So at KidLitCon I was on this great panel called CYBILS: Nonfiction Roundtable with Ellen Zchunke and Jennie Rothschild and we had Jennifer Wharton and Amy Broadmoore with us via technology.

We talked about being part of the Cybils, and about reviewing Non-Fiction books, and we unveiled #NFNovember ! Basically, if you blog/write/share about non-fiction for children and teens this November, we want to hear about it and share the love. If you've never reviewed a non-fiction book, this is a great month to start.

So over at On The Shelf 4 Kids, Ellen's blog, she has a google form where you can submit a blog post that you'd like to have featured.

Here at Everead, you can just leave a comment on this post if you've got some non-fiction love to share. Throughout the month I'll check out what y'all leave below, and bring some of it up into my own posts. I may also end up featuring some of the ones submitted at Ellen's blog, depending on how much is submitted here, how much is submitted there, and how much time I have.

Let's party! 

What great non-fiction books do you love? 

What questions do you have for me?

Leave recommendations and links in the comments, tag tweets and instagrams and other social media with #NFNovember.

p.s. The document that we made with the audience at the Roundtable can be found here. I definitely want to check out a book that Amy mentioned, From Cover to Cover by Kathleen Horning. It's not the first time I've heard her rave about it. Apparently it suggests that the careful reviewer of non-fiction will look at 1) accuracy 2) organization 3) writing style 4) illustration and 5) design. Something to strive for! I've put the book on hold at my library, but if you want to shop it, that's here (affiliate link, wink wink).

 Leaf your comments below! 

(Oh, yes I did)

Stories for all: thinking about our culture and gender in books

So I just posted my review of The Princess in Black, and I wanted to give a signal boost to Shannon Hale and what she's talking about on her blog right now.

In my review I said that my boys love The Princess in Black books, and that is totally true. But I could see why some boys wouldn't want to read them. As a culture, we often discourage boys from reading books about girls.

Shannon Hale has just hosted an awesome series on her blog. She's talking about Stories for All, and especially about letting boys read books about girls without shaming them. I have to say that I knew this was kind of a problem, but I grew up in a home where we were encouraged to read everything. It wasn't my problem. It's only been in the past few years, as my oldest son has gotten a little bit older, that I've started noticing the social pressure for him to avoid doing girly things. I don't know if I cared before, but now, I think it's personal.

I took the kids on a hike the other day. They insisted on bringing books along.

I don't want my sons to feel like they can't read a really good book, because they would be teased or judged for carrying around a book with a girl on the cover. Girls carry around books about boys all the time, and adults don't mind at all. I think a lot of people recognize that it would be good for boys to learn how to cook. I haven't heard much teasing about that, at least in his generation. But the books? Yeah, we've got some habits to change, there.

So, anyway, I'm going to link to a couple more of my favorite pieces on Shannon's blog. All of them were good, but I particularly liked this one by a librarian who conducted an experiment, and the one by a young author whose book has a pink cover, and this one that starts with Ramona the Pest, and especially this one, by a guy who wrote a book with a girl as the main character.

For further reading, I definitely recommend #storiesforall on twitter.

I hope you'll look into this, whether you have sons or daughters, and whether or not you're a parent.

Have you observed kids being told they should stick to books that are marketed to their gender? Do you think it's a problem?

I'd love to talk about it.

The Princess in Black!!!

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess, pretty in pink. But then the monster alarm rang, and she transformed into . . . The Princess in Black!

The Princess in Black

and

The Princess in Black and the Perfect Princess Party

by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

I absolutely adore this series. If you're a long-time reader of Everead, you've heard me mention it before: when I heard it announced and when I first laid eyes on it.

The Princess in Black books are "first-chapter books" or "early chapter books" or whatever you want to call a book that has 14 or 15 chapters, each about 5 pages long. They're easier than Magic Tree House books, and more completely illustrated.

When The Princess in Black came out I bought it right away. I may have even pre-ordered it. I love Shannon Hale, and I know that Shannon and her husband Dean do good work together from their foray into graphic novels: Rapunzel's Revenge and Calamity Jack. Plus, LeUyen Pham came to my attention for her awesome illustrations in the Alvin Ho series (another early chapter book series I love) and won my heart forever with The Boy Who Loved Math. With my favorite author and my favorite illustrator teaming up, chances were good I was going to love the book they made. As it turns out, I really liked The Princess in Black, but I got sidetracked and never wrote a review of it.

It has secret passageways, secret identities, huge monsters and goats in distress. It has princesses, pretty dresses, and a unicorn. Most importantly it has humor in the text and humor in the illustration and both my boys love it. You better believe that The Princess in Black is a book for both boys and girls because if you don't you're just sticking your head in a hole. I've never met a boy that didn't like it.*

And book two is even better! The Princess in Black and the Perfect Princess Party is more structured, and I think it would be easier to read. The first time I read book one, I was confused by one of the sentence fragments and surprised by the back-and-forth of two narratives happening during the same time (Duchess Wigtower in the castle and The Princess in Black in the pasture). Obviously that didn't ruin the book for me, I still loved it. But I think that book two keeps things together better, with the repetition of Princess Magnolia having to leave her own birthday party over and over to go fight monsters.

Not only are the stories so much fun, but they're sprinkled throughout with little details that make you smile. At least, they make us smile. Jacob loved that Princess Magnolia's unicorn was named Frimplepants. I love the cardinal, who looks like he's wearing a black mask of his own. Benjamin (age 7) loves the phrase "Twinkle twinkle little . . . SMASH!" and was worried for a minute that it wouldn't make it into the second book. Levi (age 5) loved seeing the different ideas the monsters had for how to eat a goat: in a sandwich, in an ice cream cone, etc.  Jubilee (age 2) requests the books and talks excitedly about what's happening in the pictures while I read.

You might be surprised at the level of the vocabulary in these books. Though they're first chapter books, I wouldn't call them "easy readers." You know, some books will only use a certain number of words (sometimes listed in the front) in order to help children practice sight words and learn new words. That's not the case with these books. I found myself explaining what it meant that the princess "minced" across the room in book one, and spotted the word "exasperating" in book two. As we read about the party, I found myself explaining to Levi that the princesses names were flowers, and each was dressed to represent her name. Different turns of phrase, especially "That is curious," caught my attention as well. These books may be short, but I consider them complex, in a good way. For more educated opinions on the second book, you should definitely read the reviews by Jen Robinsion and Ms. Yingling. I didn't even catch the alliteration that Jen mentioned until she pointed it out.

I highly recommend these books for ages 3-8 particularly, though I think they're worth reading no matter what age you are. When I received the copy of book two that I requested from the publisher, it came to light that Jacob had never actually read book one. I couldn't believe it! I handed them to him that night and stuck close by so I could here him chuckle and get his commentary.

The Princess in Black and the Perfect Princess Party only disappointed me in one way: I need more of Duff the goat boy! I trust he'll be featured in book three, The Princess in Black and the Hungry Bunny Horde, which comes out in February 2016. UPDATE: My review of Book 3 is here!

Just so you know, some of the images above are affiliate links. If you shop through them, I may earn a small commission. Thanks. :)

So, have you read these yet? Are you interested? Definitely share your thoughts with me.

KidLitCon 2015 - a quick report

Just had to pop in real quick to say I loved KidLitCon.

It was so great to be in a place with people who were all the exact same kind of nerdy as I am.

I thought the conference was the perfect size. Big enough that it was definitely a conference and not just an oversized book club, but small enough that you could meet and connect with a lot of people.

I got to meet all the people on my list of "people I must meet at KidLitCon." Yes, I had an actual list, mostly of people whose blog and faces I know from Cybils and twitter and such. And, I feel like I went beyond super-bonus-level by meeting so many really cool people that I wasn't even planning on meeting. Without exception everyone I met was kind and intelligent.

I loved all the sessions that I went to, and the two that I presented in went really well. Better than I expected!

While I was at the conference, I was tweeting some of my favorite quotes from people.

"If you don't stick with it, you don't get better" says @MatthewWinner of #LGBpodcast. #kidlitcon #podcasting

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 10, 2015

"If dese Grimm boys gonna have a giant book wit dere name on it, me too!" Said the young @TraceyBaptiste to herself. #kidlitcon The Jumbies

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 10, 2015

Author Jay Hostler says "put your work online and don't wait. You'll never be good enough in your head." #kidlitcon #GraphicNovel

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 10, 2015

"The more personal [stories] are, the more universal they seem to be." @TraceyBaptiste #kidlitcon #keynotespeaker

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 10, 2015

"I think ALL memoirs should be comics." Maggie Thrash, author of the memoir Honor Girl. @maggiethrash #kidlitcon #GraphicNovel #memoir

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 10, 2015

Mary Fan on diversity and intersectionality: "At the end of the day we're ALL " us" and the only "them" is ignorance. #kidlitcon

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 10, 2015

Alison Formento says of the @KidLitAuthors group, "when one of us publishes a book, it boosts all of us." #kidlitcon #teamwork

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 9, 2015

#KidLitCon Best analogy award goes to @CarrieMesrobian for "have you heard of Cheese Whiz? ... It's kind of the consistency of lip gloss."

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 9, 2015

In the world of children's lit, @MattPhelanDraws says "There is no room for cynicism." #kidlitcon #truth And that's what we love about it.

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 9, 2015

Follow this link to see our presentation! https://t.co/6jq5e7RMrf

— Alysa Stewart (@everead) October 9, 2015

I also put up some fun instagrams:

Party in Balltimoar!!! #KidLitCon @mmfbooks

A photo posted by Alysa Stewart (@everead) on Oct 9, 2015 at 6:42pm PDT

I feel like I didn't get my crazy eyes quite crazy enough. But hey, I turned the sky pink and used three exclamation points, so . . . come to think of it I should have used more exclamation points. This may be my only regret about the whole shebang.

Mahnaz Dar, editor at School Library Journal, edits a column before our very eyes! #kidlitcon #nerdy #schoollibraryjournal #slj

A photo posted by Alysa Stewart (@everead) on Oct 10, 2015 at 11:53am PDT

I was so sad I missed today's #graphicnovel panel at #KidLitCon, but happy that I got to talk to Matt Phelan anyway. Here, he is showing off his fancy new pencil case. Matt Phelan is the author and illustrator of a bunch of books I love! #mattphelan #zitathespacegirl

A photo posted by Alysa Stewart (@everead) on Oct 9, 2015 at 1:51pm PDT

And I just wanted to tell you that when I was on the phone with my kids, my two-year-old Jubilee did the cutest thing ever.
"Can I talk to mommy?" I heard her ask.
"Yes," I heard my husband say.
Then she queried, "Mommy can I have a snack?"
Hahaha! "Of course you can! Daddy will get it for you."
We had the exact same conversation the next night, too.

In short, I came away from KidLitCon feeling inspired with so many great ideas and feeling empowered to do them through new knowledge and community support. If you're thinking about going next year, just start planning now. So worth it.