Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Road Trip Wednesday- Best Book of November

Road Trip Wednesday Best Book of November


I only read ONE book this month, which I think is forgivable when you look at how many books I've read in the past few months.
My brain has been sort of fried. 
Between work, illness and life I've been slacking a lot. 

But I did read October Sky.

October Sky isn't a book I would read willingly.  I need to teach it, in Decemeber.  So I went to Borders and bought my copy and nearly had a heartaccked.  It was a 425 page book.  WHAT!  I need to teach 425 pages to 8th graders. 
My kids were going to go all Lord of The Flies on me.  Dear God, I was going to be Piggy.
Then I started reading it.

It was good.

That's weird.  Books I teach are almost never good.  They're normally way to hard or way to easy or the characters leave you sort of feeling meh. 

But this was really good.

I found myself changing from Teacher Reading Mode, underlining vocab and confusing terms to Enjoying Reading Mode.

The story is about a boy named Sonny (or Homer depending on who's talking to him) living in a WV coal town during the Space Race.  His father runs the coal mine and his mother is convinced the mine and resulting town is dying.  Sonny builds a rocket after being inspired by sputnik.  His mother encourages Sonny's interest in rockets and often runs interference between Sonny and his dad. 

The book is about Sonny's friends, life in high school, fitting in, crushes on girls and making rockets.

It was AWESOME.  I cried at the end.  

It's going to fun to teach and interesting to see the kids reactions. 

Go out and read this book, you'll enjoy page, all 425 pages of them. 

Wanna win a MYSTERY PRIZE?  Enter my contest, please. 

5 comments:

  1. I have heard of this but never read it-- nothing better than getting to teach a book you enjoy!

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  2. I'd love to know what your students think of it.

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  3. Enjoyed the movie, so I'm sure I'll like the book. :)

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  4. I haven't heard of this before. Now I want to check it out!

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