reading
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Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Cinder by Marissa Meyer My rating: 3 of 5 stars As much as I wanted to get into this book about a Cyborg with way more problems than Cinderella (who the book loosely resembles), I had trouble with the world-building and the flow of unfolding the politics of this fantastic setting. I had trouble understanding…
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The Bear by Claire Cameron
The Bear by Claire Cameron My rating: 4 of 5 stars The UGDSB has just chosen this book as our board-wide novel for secondary students and author Ms. Cameron will be visiting schools in May 2015. After reading this terrifying novel, I am nervous about the problematic areas in Cameron’s choices. As a parent, I…
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Launching a book club with a riddle
My White Pine book club is growing stale. The same few students join every year (which is awesome) but I’m not reaching as far as I’d like to in my secondary school of 1200 students. So I’m trying an additional book club this year in a different format. The book I’ve chosen is “This Dark…
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The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Recent winner of the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen fiction for 2014, Cathy Marie Buchanan transported me to another place and time with this story of sisters surviving all the odds against them in 1880s Paris. I love it when a book prompts…
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The Silent Summer of Kyle McGinley by Jan Andrews
The Silent Summer of Kyle McGinley by Jan Andrews My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is my first read of the 2014-15 Ontario Library Association’s White Pine picks for this year and based on this book alone, I’m very hopeful. Like last year’s Old Man by David A. Poulsen, our main character Kyle McGinley…
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Reading in a Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley
Jenkins and Kelley offer an optimistic alternative to Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains which is filled, as Jenkins claims, with “contemporary anxieties” (p. 10). The book offers instead this explanation: “As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these [media] changes. But one thing is…
book reviews, books, Code Switch, collection development, Collective intelligence, definition of literacy, educational research, Henry Jenkins, library leadership, literacy, literacy promotion, Negotiating Cultural Spaces, Nicholas Carr, Participatory Culture, professional development, reading, Reading in a Participatory Culture, research, school librarian, school library, secondary school library, secondary school teacher, struggling reader, student-centred learning, teacher-librarian, transliteracy, Wyn Kelley
threadbare beauty 