What's Mr. Giso Making "Room to Read" Pick 11

Title:  Sometimes People March

Author/Illustrator:  Tessa Allen

Publication Information:  2020, Balzer & Bray

Received or Recommended By:  Amazon

Number of Pages:  28

Level/Target Audience:  PreK-adult

Genre:  Picture Book/ Narrative Nonfiction

Date Finished:  February 2, 2022

Part of a Series?:  No.

First Lines:  Sometimes ants march.  Sometimes bands march.  Sometimes people march.

Last Lines:  And together we find the courage to march.

Quotable Quotes: 

•People march for the freedom to love and live and learn.

•People are more powerful together.

Teaching Points:  This book is great tool to launch a study of historic movements and marches of both the past and the present.  The end pages include supplemental information to all the key figures and featured marches throughout the text and illustrations including the Woman's Suffrage Movement (1776-1920), the Greensboro Sit-Ins (1960), Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Black Lives Matter movement (2018-present), the Pride Parade (1970-present) and the People's Climate March (2017).

Author Tessa Allen dedicates this book to her family "who have always encouraged [her] me to be feisty and curious."  It introduces young readers to a familiar use of the word "march" as something both ant and bands do.  From there, it expands the idea to marches that occur in order to resist injustice, create change, gain freedom, and protect the earth.  The carefully placed illustrations help show that people can show resistance in many ways besides marching.  These ways include using voice, typed words, songs, or art.  In addition to marching, this picture book cleverly shows how people resit by having meetings, standing up, sitting down, or even taking a knee.  This book carries the theme that even though the road may not be easy, problems may become too complex, and one may grow pretty tired and feel defeated people, when together, can make a difference.  This is book leaves the reader hopeful, inspired and empowered.  It celebrates the heroes who have stood proud for us and have fought for us to receive the many rights we have today.

What's Mr. Giso Making "Room to Read" Pick 10

Title:  Harbor Me

Author:  Jacquelin Woodson

Publication Information:  2018, Puffin Books

Received or Recommended By:  4th and 5th grade ELA teachers at my school

Number of Pages:  176

Level/Target Audience:  Grades 5-8

Genre:  Realistic Fiction

Date Finished:  January 30, 2022

Part of a Series?:  No.

First Lines:  We think they took my papi.  It's over now.  Or maybe it isn't.  Maybe, even as I sit on my bed in the dying light of the late afternoon, it's beginning again.  Maybe Ms. Laverne is looking over the new class list, her finger moving down the row of names.

Last Lines:  Me too, I say.  And when I rest my head against his arm, when the music circles around us, when my uncle stopped packing and joins in with his guitar and we pool up the song as if we'd always been singing it, what I know for sure now is that this is the end of one of many stories.  And also a beginning.

Quotable Quotes: 

•But what's unfamiliar shouldn't be scary.  And it shouldn't be avoided either.

•None of us really knew about forevers yet.  We were still just learning how things could change in a minute--how you could be in the middle of putting plates on the table when the phone rings with bad news.

•I want you to know that we are all flawed, he said.  We all have those days when we don't want to show up.  Days we just want to forget the world.  Doesn't make us bad people.  Just makes us people.  And time moves as it moves.  In a month, this moment won't be anything.

•Tragedy is strange.  It takes away.  And it gives too.

Teaching Points:  Immigration, social justice/injustice, author's craft and structure (use of dialogue), poetry, diverse family structure, character development, social emotional learning, bullying, death and dying

This is the story of Hayley, Holly, Esteban, Tiago, Amari and Ashton--classmates in what appears to be a sub-separate middle school classroom.  It's set in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.  Their endearing teacher, Ms. Laverne, gives them the last hour of Friday to sit in a circle, alone, and "talk."  Things start off with an awkward silence among the six classmates who couldn't appear to be more different.  Over time, however, they grow into a tight circle of friends who realize that they all share experiencing loss, wanting to belong, seeking to be free, and more importantly, looking to be "harbored" when in need.  The group shares their darkest secrets in their ARTT Room (A Room to Talk). This book is a mirror book to young adolescents dealing with incarceration, death of a parent, diverse learning styles, racial identity, socioeconomic imbalances and deportation.  This book serves as a powerful window to those that may not directly relate to the characters in this book.  Reading this invokes a feeling of empathy during a time when we need it most.  When asked why she wrote this book, Woodson notes "I have so many questions.  Sometimes, writing is the only way I can answer them."