Announcing the 4th and 5th Grade TDS Library Book Club

Educators and librarians are always trying to find a way to prevent the decline in recreational reading that happens in middle school. Fourth and fifth graders still tend to enjoy reading for pleasure. To encourage them to continue taking delight in books, we will begin a 4th-5th-grade book club in the TDS Library. The children and I nominated over twenty titles to read together for our first selection, and they voted on ten. In a very tight election, the winner was The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin; a clever, funny and exciting mystery full of challenging puzzles. We will meet every other Thursday in the library at lunch.

March is Women’s History Month

To celebrate Women's History Month, Tehiyah mom, Linda Press Wulf, will visit 5th-7th grades on Wednesday, March 7 to talk about her process as an author writing The Night of the Burning: Devorah's Story. This beautiful and important book tells the story of Linda's mother-in-law who survived a pogrom in Poland in 1920 and was rescued from an orphanage by South African philanthropist, Isaac Ochberg. We will be selling autographed copies of the book that day.

And Tehiyah parent, Diane Wolf, will do a reading from her new book Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland as a benefit for the Tehiyah Library on Sunday March 11th at 3 p.m. A former hidden child from Holland will be present to answer questions. Parents and middle school students are invited.

We have many books about Women’s History from new picture books like Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor, Julia Morgan Builds a Castle, and If This Bus Could Talk about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott to new collected biographies like Latina Women and histories of the women’s movement like The Untold Story of the Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists. We also have many individual biographies and wonderful picture books folk tale collections and novels that celebrate strong and creative women.

One such novel is the new Newbery award winner, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. This is an exciting story about a delightful and resourceful young girl. The controversy surrounding the use of one word is, in my opinion, overblown. The word (scrotum) is used appropriately to describe where a rattlesnake bites a dog.

March Author/Illustrator Birthdays

Leo Dillon
Dr. Seuss (Read Across America Day)
Dav Pilkey
Mem Fox
Thacher Hurd
Kenneth Grahame
Lois Lowry
Wanda Gag
Ezra Jack Keats
Virginia Hamilton
Anno
Louis Sachar
Randolph Caldecott
Robert Frost
Dick King-Smith

Celebrate spring with books!