The Weird series (Free Spirit Publishing)
Written by Erin Frankel and illustrated by Paula Heaphy
Grades 1 through 5

The Weird series introduces readers to Luisa, Jayla, and Sam—three girls intertwined in a bullying experience. Each story is told from their own viewpoint—the victim, the bystander, and the bully. In the first book, WEIRD!, we meet Luisa who is the target of the bullying. She endures relentless putdowns aimed at her unique style and personality. This causes her to emotionally suffer and become confused as to why this is happening and how to make it stop. She finally reveals the truth of what is going on to her mother who helps her reclaim her former self-confidence.

In the second book, DARE!, we are introduced to Jayla the bystander of the bully problem. In the beginning, Jayla does nothing to stop Luisa being tormented because she is afraid of the bully. Readers discover Jayla was also once a victim of the girl's taunts. Author Erin Frankel shows us the danger of becoming a bystander in the second book when Jayla joins in the bullying because she feels intimidated and pressured into doing so. One day Jayla dares herself to take a stand and have courage to fight this problem. She learns to cope with her past fears by befriending Luisa and standing up for her.

In the concluding book of the series, TOUGH!, we meet Sam who has been behind all of the bullying. But readers also discover what is underneath all of the mean behavior. Sam is exposed to television programs depicting bullying behavior, bullied by her brother at home, and has also been picked on at school. The only way she feels she can regain control is by hurting others and acting tough to cover up her own secret pain. Sam finally loses her bullying ways when a teacher intervenes and offers to help. Her anger and desire to lash out at others subsides when she begins to use kindness and compassion.

The illustrations in this story will definitely spur discussion. It is illustrated in black and white except for the characters in each book who are in color. Two of the same pages overlap and appear in each book. Each book in the series also includes an activity guide and helpful information for adults. The Weird! series is a powerful teaching tool about bullying. It's insightful, creative, and will touch students' hearts and minds and empower them to stop bullying.

Cross-curricular connections: Character Education, Writing, Art, Language Arts

Ideas for Classroom Use:

Character Study through Illustrations

Lead a discussion around the use of color in the books. Divide the class into three groups and give them each a different book to study. Allow them to take notes on their observations by using sticky notes. On a white board, write the names of each different book and allow each group to put all of their observations under each title. Students can also take it a step further and try to interpret why they feel color was used this way.

Some observations students should look for and discussion points:

• The story is black and white except for the main characters.
• The main characters are in color.
• Luisa's colors fade as the bullying continues.
• Jayla's colors fade as she stands by silently watching Luisa being bullied and joins in on the bullying.
• Luisa's polka dots float away, Jayla's stars fade, and Sam wears hearts under a hoodie.
• Luisa's polka dots come back bigger and brighter than ever.
• Jayla's stars come back in full color.
• Sam stops hiding behind her hooded sweatshirt and we see her hearts as we see her kindness begin to grow.

Insightful questions:

• What color do you feel when you are happy?
• What color do you feel when you are bullied or when you see someone else being bullied?
• What happens to your color when you feel powerless?
• What happens when you are empowered?
• How can you protect your color?
• How can you protect other people's colors?

As a closing activity for this lesson, have students write and illustrate their own story about bullying from their point of view. Were they the victim, bystander, or maybe even the bully? Encourage students to use color in a similar fashion as it was in the Weird! series to represent their power and how they overcame their problem. Allow students to share their stories with the classroom community. For younger students, allow them to do a drawing using colors that make them feel courageous, confident, and kind.

Additional Resources and Activities:

PACER
This website contains information from the creators of National Bullying Prevention Month and The National Center for Bullying Prevention that helps promote awareness and teach effective ways to respond to bullying.
Kids’ site: www.pacerkidsagainstbullying.org
Teen site: www.pacerteensagainstbullying.org

NEA Bully Free Schools
This website provides information on NEA’s bullying prevention campaign. There are also tips and resources to help you address the issue of bullying in your classroom.

Choose Kind
This is a blog inspired by R.J. Palacio’s WONDER. It contains links to anti-bullying resources and opportunities to use the novel in conjunction with efforts to get your students to “choose kindness.”

Teaching Tolerance
This website by the Southern Poverty Law Center offers a documentary, classroom activities, and teaching kits that promote tolerance.

The Trevor Project
This website is a companion to the Trevor Lifeline, a 24-hour, national crisis and suicide prevention lifeline for gay and questioning teens. The site offers teacher resources, tips, and training. The number for the hotline is 1-866-4-U-Trevor.

Bully Free Program
This website offers a range of tips for dealing with bullying for teachers, students, and parents.

Claim Your Rights
The Claim Your Rights program is designed to help everyone understand that they have the right to safer schools. This resource helps students, parents, and teachers report incidences of bullying, particularly when schools deny that bullying exists.

Roxanne Davidson has been working as an elementary school counselor since obtaining her Master's Degree in Education in 2005. Bibliotherapy has always been a passion of hers as she has witnessed the healing power of books in her students' lives. She has made it her mission to help teachers, children, and parents find contemporary books to help them address the many issues kids currently deal with in the classroom and at home. This inspired her to start the popular book review blog, Books That Heal Kids. Besides writing for her blog she enjoys running, reading and spending time with her husband and daughter.

© 2012 Roxanne Davidson. Please do not reproduce in any form, electronic or otherwise.

SKY COLOR (Candlewick, 2012)
Written and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds
Pre-K through Grade 3

SKY COLOR describes the thought process of a child named Marisol when she is faced with a dilemma of painting the sky in a school mural. Marisol, as well as the people around her, considers herself to be a true artist. In the fashion of an artist, she wants everything to be just perfect in her works of art. She also encourages others to explore their artistic side as well.

Marisol is excited when her class is allowed to paint the mural in the school’s library. Everything is going well as the students work together to brainstorm, design, and draw out the concept of the mural. The trouble begins when Marisol cannot find the color of the sky that she feels is most accurate—blue. Over the next pages, Marisol’s thought process is modeled through her riding the bus home, thinking on the porch, dreaming, and waking up to a rainy day. She finds the true sky color and is able to finish her portion of the mural with great success.

This book will be great to introduce critical thinking and thinking outside the proverbial box. Students should be encouraged to think about the world beyond their comfort zone and consider other possibilities.

Cross-curricular connections: Science, Art, Math

Ideas for Classroom Use:

Color Mixing

The purpose of this activity is to review or teach the primary and secondary colors. Marisol was set on using blue for her sky color and could not figure out a way to get blue. Before reading the story, have students try mixing various colors of finger paint or tempera paint to see if they can create new colors. Encourage creative thinking of ways to mix colors and chart what blends result in different colors. Is there more than one blend of colors to make a certain color? Have students determine which colors could never be created by mixing other colors. Then show and discuss the colors wheel in reference to primary and secondary colors.

Read SKY COLOR to the students after the color mixing and discuss the colors Marisol mixed and created and see if any of her colors matched the student’s creations. Then, encourage them to use their newly created colors to create a picture. Have them dictate/write the description of their picture and why they chose the color to paint with. Encourage creative thinking and use of colors.

Tree Changes

The purpose of this activity is to foster creativity in looking at the world around the school/home and thinking beyond the present. As a group, read the story SKY COLOR. Ask students to focus on the things that are different than expected in the story. Discuss what was different than their expectations through the book. For instance, when I read this story to my classroom, they were fully expecting Marisol to have discovered a way to make the color blue for the sky. When I turned to the final page, they were all amazed.

Children should be able to pick up on this difference without much direction. Discuss the fact that items can appear different at different times of the day, such as the sky, and at different times of the year.

Have students brainstorm, as a group for young children or in small groups for older grades, a list of things that change their appearance. Encourage children to accept all answers even if they don’t agree with them. Discuss the lists and allow children to justify their thoughts. Fall, in most areas, is a perfect time to observe these changes quite easily in the color changes of a tree.

As a follow up project, have students create a drawing, story, or painting or a tree without using the traditional colors of brown and green. Have students dictate/write their reasoning for the colors they chose for their tree. Students can showcase their creations in an art gallery like Marisol did and collect feedback from other students.

Sky Graph

The purpose of this activity is to introduce/study changes in the sky, and introduce the concept of graphing to young students and review graphing with older students. Read SKY COLOR to the students and discuss the changes in the sky Marisol was looking at. These observations can be done over a series of days or weeks. Have students keep a log, journal, or chart of the sky color over an assigned amount of time. For younger students, this may be best done once each day during school time, and once each evening with parents over the course of a week. Have students record the color of the sky at each of those intervals.

As a group, in pairs, or individually, depending on the age of the students, transfer the observation information into graphs. Each student’s graph may be a bit different depending on the times they observed the sky. Determine with students if there is a color that is more prevalent than the others. What is sky color?

Create a definition as a class of what sky color is based on the observations and graphs made. Write a poem or short story with illustration of “sky color.” Each child should be encouraged to express their own thoughts as the sky looks different through each set of eyes. Dictate/Write the stories and display along with illustrations in an art gallery (bulletin board) display for other classes to see as well.

Additional Resources and Activities:

A Classroom Guide for Sky Color
This PDF guide contains activities suggested by Peter Reynolds for use with his book, SKY COLOR. The file has ideas for classroom use, as well as a little background information on how the book was created. The author has also included a couple printables for use with his activities.

Why Leaves Change Color
This website provides background information about why leaves change colors in the fall. The US Department of Agriculture details how weather affects trees, what creates the colors, the best places to see fall colors, and how the leaves help to enrich the soil after they fall. This is easy to read background information to accompany the “Tree Changes” project.

Catch a Rainbow
This website provides an easy to complete science project showing the process of color mixing. The materials for the project are easily accessible and inexpensive. The page gives the directions, ingredients list, a printable sheet for marking observations, and a link to an easy to read and follow color wheel. The color wheel is printable as well to serve as a guide for the color mixing project.

Kathy Prater is a Reading Specialist who works with students with dyslexia, an Adjunct Professor at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi, and a full time pre-kindergarten teacher at Starkville Academy in Starkville, Mississippi. Her passions include reading, writing, tending her flock of 15 chickens, and helping students at all levels to find motivation for lifelong reading and learning. She believes that every child can become a successful reader if given the right tools and encouragement.

WANT TO WRITE FOR ENGAGE? Send your name, the grade level(s) you teach, the title of book that you put to work, and a line or two about how you use it in your classroom to engage-membership@reading.org.


© 2012 Kathy Prater. Please do not reproduce in any form, electronic or otherwise.

AMELIA EARHART: THIS BROAD OCEAN (Hyperion Books, 2010)
Written by Sarah Stewart Taylor and illustrated by Ben Towle
Grades 5-9

AMELIA EARHART: THIS BROAD OCEAN, by Sarah Stewart Taylor and Ben Towle, is a work of historical fiction in a graphic novel format. The story centers on Earhart’s time in Trepassey, Newfoundland , as she prepares for her attempt to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in 1928.

The narrator is Grace, a young girl from the island of Trepassey with a nose for news. Grace writes THE TREPASSEY HERALD and is familiar with much of the opposition faced by Earhart as Grace, too, is trying to make it in a field that is dominated by men and not seen as a place for women. Earhart’s time in Trepassey is one of the highlights of Grace’s young life, especially when she has the opportunity to talk to Earhart directly.

The story continues into Grace’s future and shows her living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, still pursuing her dream to be a serious journalist. Grace has kept up with Earhart’s exploits and is devastated to learn of her disappearance. The parallel stories of Grace and Earhart serve to highlight the struggles faced by women as they attempt to break into male-dominated careers.

The images of this graphic novel are rendered in black, white, and turquoise. While this color combination may seem odd, the black and white provides detail, while the turquoise captures the feeling of both the sky and the ocean. Towle masterfully uses a variety of panel shapes and sizes to illustrate how time is passing in the story, as well as to emphasize the emotions in important moments.

The introduction by Eileen Collins provides another highlight of this historical fiction graphic novel. Collins was the first female pilot of a space shuttle and considers Earhart to be one of her inspirations and heroes. Without Earhart’s actions, Collins would not have had the opportunity to pilot a space shuttle.

Cross-curricular Connections: history/social studies, visual literacy, math, science, language arts/English

Ideas for Classroom Use:

How Much is too Much? (Grades 8-9)

In addition to the weather, the weight of Earhart’s airplane was cited as one of the reasons that the crew was having difficulty getting it into the air. Many calculations were done on the weight of the gas and the distance that had to be traveled. Students could complete these same calculations by determining the weight of a gallon of gas, the distance traveled, how many miles per gallon and how much fuel the plane could safely carry.

Students could also complete an experiment on the weight of gallons of different liquids, such as water, milk, soda, etc. Older, or more advanced students, could also include an exploration of the physics of flight and the impact that weight has on lift.

Panel Discussions (Grades 5-9)

The authors provide “panel discussions” in the back of the book that either expand upon information found in a panel, provide background to events in the panel, or give additional bibliographic information. Students can research and write their own panel discussions or add to the authors’ panel discussions.

A variation on this activity could be the creation of additional panels for the graphic novel with the research to support the panel.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (Grades 7-9)

The purpose of this activity is to develop and hone students’ visual literacy skills. Many theorists in the field of comics and graphic novels, including Scott McCloud (UNDERSTANDING COMICS), discuss the importance of “reading” and understanding visual images.

Towle is a master of using the elements of the graphic novel to capture a feeling. The image on page 51 is one such example. The lower left corner of the page features Grace’s back with her arms raised to the sky. The rest of the page is white except for a small black rendition of the profile of an airplane in the upper right hand corner. The open space and the subdued colors allow readers a window into Grace’s longing for both freedom and equality.

Ask students to analyze this image (or others) for the feelings and meanings that it conveys. Encourage students to find additional examples of pages where the images carry the weight of the meaning.

Pioneering Women Journalists (Grades 5-9)

Grace, the narrator of AMELIA EARHART: THIS BROAD OCEAN, wants to be a journalist, but in the 1930s this was not considered “women’s work.” However, just like Earhart, there were pioneering women in the field of journalism. Have students complete research on these early women journalists. Students could present their findings in a wide variety of fashions; in keeping with the journalism theme, students could write a newspaper story about a pioneering woman journalist or conduct a mock television interview.

Classroom News/Herald (Grades 5-7)

Grace authored her small town’s newspaper, THE TRESPASSEY HERALD, and tried to report on all the important local events. Using this as inspiration, have students write a classroom newsletter. Ask them to consider some of the following questions:

• What format will the newsletter take (digital or print)?
• How often will the newsletter be published?
• What will you call the newsletter?
• What are considered important events worth covering?

In addition to this being a fun and educational experience for students, it may also provide an interesting way to keep parents informed of class happenings.

Additional Resources and Activities:

Random House Teacher’s Guide to AMELIA LOST: THE LIFE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF AMELIA EARHART by Candace Fleming

Fleming’s 2012 Orbis Pictus Honor Book is targeted towards middle grade readers, and as such, presents the story of Amelia Earhart’s life and disappearance in interesting and understandable ways. The link is to a PDF version of the educator’s guide to the text.

George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers (Purdue University Libraries)

In 1934, Earhart was invited to lecture at Purdue University by Purdue’s then-president Edward C. Elliott. In fact, Earhart was on a leave of absence from Purdue when she disappeared in 1937, during her attempt to fly across the world along the equator. This archival collection of pictures, documents, correspondence and more is maintained by the Purdue University Libraries. More than 3,500 materials from this collection are available online, including some of the maps used by Earhart and her marriage license. The site also includes an extensive biography of Earhart and links to additional resources.

American Experience: Amelia Earhart

PBS’s American Experience series is well-known for its depth of coverage on the events and people that have contributed to the American experience. This is a link to the almost hour-long exploration of Amelia Earhart’s life, achievements, and historical impact. This video could serve as great way to build background knowledge or to serve as a supplement after reading AMELIA EARHART: THIS BROAD OCEAN.

The Official Website of Amelia Earhart

While the “official” nature of this website is difficult to determine, it does provide a great deal of information and links to additional web sources. Visitors to this website can read an extensive biography of Earhart and view several images of Earhart. One of the most interesting resources on this site is its collection of recent news stories related to Earhart.

Aimee Rogers is a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota studying children’s and adolescent literature. Prior to her return to school, Aimee taught high school students with special needs, in a wide variety of settings, for ten years. She misses working with adolescents but is developing a passion for working with undergraduate pre-service teachers. She has a growing interest in graphic novels for children and young adults and is hoping to make them the topic of her dissertation.

WANT TO WRITE FOR ENGAGE? Send your name, the grade level(s) you teach, the title of book that you put to work, and a line or two about how you use it in your classroom to engage-membership@reading.org.



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