Carbs for Everyone: Everybody Cooks Rice.

How about a trip with your family this summer? Open the pages of Everybody Cooks Rice by Norah Dooley and join Carrie in her neighborhood in which every home is inhabited by a family from a different culture. Carrie is always happy to find her brother at dinnertime, because she ends up in a neighbor’s house sampling native foods!

The text of Everybody Cooks Rice is appropriate for students who have just begun reading, while the cross-cultural words will challenge experienced readers. Why not read this book together as a family? Put a map on the wall and pretend that you are visiting the many lands represented in the book. Use the cultures as a jumping off point to create research opportunities for your children: go to the library or search the web to find out more information about each country, books that bring the cultures to life through other characters, or find out more about the cultures of the people in your own neighborhood.

The best surprise of all: the recipe for each dish is provided in this narrative/cookbook! Home lesson, here we come. What fun you will have visiting markets to locate special ingredients. Have your children read the recipes in order to create shopping lists, and practice math skills while you buy and measure ingredients. Before you know it, it’s dinnertime. Whose turn is it to set the table?

Don’t say Boo to a Goose: Mem Fox and Wonderful Writing with Children

I’m really not sure which I prefer: Mem Fox’s books for adults or her imaginative, engaging, playful books for children. The author of such well-known favorites  as Hattie and the Fox and Koala Lou, Mem Fox is just someone you will want to know well if you teach writing or reading to children.

She summarizes her advice about teaching writing in her book, Radical Reflections: “Children develop language through interaction, not action. They learn to talk by talking to someone who responds. They must therefore learn to write by writing to someone who responds.”

Fox’s books invite response. Students of all ages will respond to her sense of humor and vivid images. Her book, Boo to a Goose, is a fanciful rhyme study that invites young children or older children with special needs to practice the skill of phonemic awareness. As children and adults read the book together, they are drawn in to the rhyming pattern.

“I’d feed my pajamas to giant piranhas
But I wouldn’t say “Boo” to a goose.

Funny, playful, and creative, Fox’s book is everything we hope our students’ writing will be.

In addition, the paper-cut illustrations of David Miller add to the inspiration of the well-chosen words by Fox.

I would imagine that children would jump out of their seats in order to continue the word patterns created by Fox with their own contributions to the pattern. This book would be a great inspiration for student-created books utilizing both the wonderful word patterns of the author and the engaging illustrations as well.