Okay, officially obsessed with this series! Literally one of the cutest things!

I'm going to be reading this book with my highest group in my class and I wanted to reread it so that I can make sure we are discussing the right things at the right time. I'm interested in seeing how this is going to go. I'm slightly nervous, but at the same time, I'm not going to shy away from having hard conversations with my students.
_________
Oh wow. I read this in middle school and briefly remember liking it. But, I REALLY loved this. I cannot wait to get my hands on the rest of the books! :)

Click Here For Full Review

My students will love these.

It was really cute. I don't think my life was changed by reading it, but I can definitely see how a child could have their life changed by reading this book at the right time :)

Apparently this year is just the year where my life and everything I thought was true when it comes to eating is just being changed. Seriously, this book has changed my life. I have spend so much time in my life eating in a disordered way because I thought that that was what I needed to do to be healthy. I’ve been intuitive eating for a few weeks now and I have never been happier with my eating. And, it’s not only my eating. This philosophy has pertained to my work life, live life, and self care. I will never go on a diet again. I never thought I would say something like that, but this philosophy not only had made me make peace with my body and food but also will allow me to trust myself and love myself more than I ever have before.

I had a lot of excitement about this book, but it wasn't really my cup of tea. I think that there was A LOT of talk about birds and birds aren't really my thing...soooooo.... yeah. There were interesting parts, but not a whole bunch.

I read this book with my Antiracist book club at work and here are a few ideas and quotes that stuck with me while reading this book (prepare yourself for a lot of Educator jargon):
1. I felt extremely validated as a Black educator who doesn't really feel like she was included in the dialogue about literacy and didn't understand why.
2. "Liberation for poor kids and linguistic minorities starts with accepting their culture and language and helping them build on it." YESS!!!
3. I really want to develop my own learning of grammar, spelling patterns, and the process of teaching a student how to read so that I can be a better educator.
4. "What the school personnel fails to understand is that if the parents were members of the culture of power and lived by its rules and codes, then they would transmit those codes to their children." If students parents are NOT members of the culture of power, educators need to realize that it is important to teach those rules and codes.
5. "Pretending that gatekeeping points don't exist is to ensure that many students will not pass through them" THANK YOU!
6. I really want to begin teaching lessons about the difference between "Formal English" and "Heritage English".
7. "To summarize, I suggest that students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher's expert knowledge while being helped to acknowledge their own 'expertness' as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent." ABOSLUTELY YESSSS.'
8. " The purpose of education is to learn to die satisfied with life." I really love this idea!
9. There's a lot of hard work that needs to be done in education.
10. Reading this helped me solidify the fact that I want to stay in education for a long time.

I'm not a big fan of books in verse, but I am a fan of Elizabeth Acevedo. This is a beautiful book, but I really just don't vibe with books in verse. I think I should have listened to this one instead of reading it because I have a super hard time connecting. Also, I wasn't SUPER interested in the plot. I think that if I wouldn't have had a whole bunch of people asking me to read this, I probably would not have. It was beautifully written, just not my cup of tea.

What an absolutely lovely book to start my 2021 reading challenge. I was OBSESSED with the babysitters club as a child. I got to the point that I was reading a book a day. I decided to pick this one up to take a trip down memory lane because I watched the Netflix series and absolutely LOVED it. I’m not sure how far into the series I’ll read but this will be a fun series to read to help me finish challenges or when I don’t have books checked out from the library.

3.5/5 stars.

This was really cute. I loved that this book went into issues of fatphobia, how fatphobic our society can be. It makes me so sad to know that people with bigger bodies can be treated so badly, and I think that Oliva Dade did a really great job of illustrating that experience. I didn't rate this higher because although very interesting to get a glimpse into, I'm not that into the fandom culture of the show they were following. I absolutely have been in fandoms, but I don't really go this hard. It was interesting to read about, but not really my thing. Fun book, I don't think I'll be reading the second one though.