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Interview and Giveaway with Author Erica S. Perl, A Sydney Taylor Honor Award Winner!

By on February 13, 2019   /   Articles, Author Interviews, Giveaways  

The Mixed-Up Files is  thrilled to be a part of the Sydney Taylor Book Blog Tour:

Named in memory of Sydney Taylor, author of the classic All-of-a-Kind Family series, the STB award recognizes books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience.

 

Huge congratulations to author Erica S. Perl for her Sydney Taylor Honor Award

in the Older Readers category for her book,

 

All Three Stooges  (Knopf BFYR) 

About the book: SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD HONOREE FOR OLDER READERS!
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE!

An unforgettable coming-of-age story about comedy, loss, and friendship for fans of Jennifer L. Holm and Gary D. Schmidt.

Spoiler alert: This book is not about the Three Stooges. It’s about Noah and Dash, two seventh graders who are best friends and comedy junkies. That is, they were best friends, until Dash’s father died suddenly and Dash shut Noah out. Which Noah deserved, according to Noa, the girl who, annoyingly, shares both his name and his bar mitzvah day.

Now Noah’s confusion, frustration, and determination to get through to Dash are threatening to destroy more than just their friendship. But what choice does he have? As Noah sees it, sometimes you need to risk losing everything, even your sense of humor, to prove that gone doesn’t have to mean “gone for good.”

Equal parts funny, honest, and deeply affecting, All Three Stooges is a book that will stay with readers long after the laughter subsides.

 

Reviews:

“Perl has created a moving coming-of-age journey steeped in Jewish traditions and comedic history, elegantly balancing humor with an honest look at the impact of suicide. Noah’s genuine voice and tricky situation will have readers pulling for him.”–Publishers Weekly

“This novel is excellent on multiple fronts. A satisfying story that will appeal to all middle grade readers.”–SLJ

“Watching Noah repeatedly sliding on a banana peel (even, once, literally) gives readers plenty of occasions to wince, to chortle, and ultimately, to applaud.”–Booklist

“A welcome portrayal of a very difficult situation’s impact on someone not ready to deal with it—and there are plenty of funny moments to make it all easier to take.”–Horn Book

 

We are delighted to welcome to Erica  to the Mixed-Up Files blog:

Erica, Your book looks delightful. Can you tell us how you came up with this idea? Does it relate to anything growing up, etc?

 All Three Stooges is about two comedy-obsessed seventh grade boys, Noah and Dash. I started writing this book when my younger child was preparing to become a bat mitzvah. When she was little, her best friend’s father died by suicide. So, I knew very early on that Dash’s dad would take his own life and that his death would affect Noah as well as Dash. This allowed me to tell the story through Noah’s perspective and show him making a series of misguided choices in a desperate attempt to reconnect with Dash. Noah, whose comfort zone is being a funny guy, has to learn empathy and how to be a mensch through a painful trial-and-error process.

 

Tell us a little about the story and how your characters evolved. They seem so funny and real.  

I researched the book by hanging out at my temple’s mid-week religious school, taking notes and trying to be a fly on the wall. I also drove the Hebrew school carpool a lot. And I volunteered at a grief camp for kids, and interviewed several teens who had lost loved ones to suicide. It was important to capture their pain, but also to capture the levity that is a defining quality of most kids this age – even those who are grieving.

 

Your book deals with some pretty heavy topics, but does so with a bit of comedy. Do you feel its important to balance the emotions of the book? 

Absolutely. In writing All Three Stooges, I needed to make sure it never felt like I was trivializing loss or pain. But at the same time, I deeply believe in the power of laughter to connect people and to heal. At grief camp, our tradition is to start off by giving the kids cans of seltzer and letting them shake them up, then explode them on themselves and others. That release – of fizzy water as well as laughter – gives them permission to also let out the darker bottled up emotions. That was precisely the balance I wanted to strike in this book (and why I made seltzer Dash’s dad’s favorite beverage).

 

I have to ask, are you a Three Stooges fan? 

 Not exactly. BUT I do have favorite Stooges clips. And I discovered after the book came out that I had a relative named Paul “Mousie” Gardner who was one of many original Stooges in their vaudeville days (before the Three Stooges went on to stardom in Hollywood).

 

What does it mean to you to win the Sydney Taylor Honor Award? 

It means the world to me. When I was little, All of a Kind Family was one of the first books I read about a Jewish family (the other was The Carp in the Bathtub). As a writer and a reader, I care deeply about the importance of accurately showing the Jewish experience to the world, so to see a Sydney Taylor silver medal on All Three Stooges makes my heart soar.

 

The Sydney Taylor Book Award is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries 

More information about the award  and a list of all of the winners can be found here: The Sydney Taylor Book Site

Learn about all of the Sydney Taylor Book Award winners by reading about them on the other Blog Tour sites listed here

 

But wait, there’s more, Erica has graciously offered to do a giveaway of her book. Please post your  comments about the book or congratulations to Erica below to be entered for a chance to win a free autographed copy of  All Three Stooges 

                                                                                                                                                     

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STEM Tuesday– Taking a Look at Climate Change/Earth Science– In the Classroom

By on February 12, 2019   /   Climate Change/Earth Science, Common Core & NGSS, Cross-Curricular, STEM Tuesday  

Tough Texts

As I discussed in last week’s In the Classroom blog, science text is tough because it is often dense–there are lots of ideas crammed into just a few sentences. Students often think of reading as an all-or-nothing proposition: either they read through and get it (success!) or they read through and didn’t (failure!). Academic text is more complicated than that. Just as they couldn’t unzip a duffle bag and instantly perceive everything inside, they won’t be able to understand most academic texts on the first read-through. They have to be like the guards at the stadium and unpack (or at least riffle through) the things inside the duffel bag.

In this month’s blog, I am going to walk through a set of unpacking tools that readers might use to work through a passage from Inside Biosphere 2: Earth Science Under Glass by Mary Kay Carson.

Before using this passage with your class, you should do a quick book-talk, explaining that the Biosphere 2 is a gigantic (multi-acre!) laboratory that reproduces several earth biomes in ways that allow scientists to control environmental variables such as the temperature, rainfall, wind, and the organisms present. One of the biomes is a tropical rainforest. Joost van Haren studies this biome.

Then present them with this passage from pages 24-25.

Highlight these strategies as you work through the passage with your students:

Chunking

Focus in on this sentence:

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas were once plants and animals full of carbon, like all living things.

There are actually three ideas in this sentence, that I have marked with slash marks (/) below.

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas were once plants and animals / full of carbon, / like all living things.

If your students are familiar with all three ideas, the sentence will be easy to read. But if some of these ideas are new, they may need to linger on them a moment, and think through what is being said and how it relates to their prior knowledge about fossil fuels.

This strategy is called chunking. Students tend to pause and think at points predetermined by the author: at commas, periods, or the ends of paragraphs. Sometimes, a reader needs to slow down and process smaller chunks of text. As Ruth Schoenbach explains in Reading for Understanding, nobody eats a pizza in one bite. Everyone has to break the pizza down, bit by bit, but different people take different sized bites.

Sketching/ Diagramming

This passage offers a whole series of causes and effects, a cascade of consequences. A quick sketch of the relationships between ideas could help keep them straight. This was my sketch through the text:

Look for surrounding supports

Many science ideas are easier to understand in diagram form, so when you encounter tough text, check surrounding pages for a diagram or illustration. In this case, some of the information in this paragraph is summarized in a diagram of a tree interacting with the environment on page 24.

Build your background

Sometimes, tough text is tough because the writer of the text assumes you already know something that you don’t already know. If you’ve tried to unpack the text, and its still tough, you may need to step back a level–not a “reading level” so much as a “knowledge level.” Read someone else’s account of the ideas, especially one aimed at a less knowledgeable audience, and see if that gives you the background for the more sophisticated text. Another book off this week’s list addressed some of these ideas in simpler form. Show students this passage from page 5 in Out of the Ice by Claire Eamer.

What information does this paragraph contribute to their understanding?

Skip it

Let students know that sometimes, its ok to just skip past a section of tough text! This can feel very freeing for struggling readers. It depends on your purpose for reading–I chose this passage because it gets at an important idea for Earth Science. But what if you are reading this because you want an overview of Biosphere 2? Or you are planning to visit, and want to know what to expect? Or you’re looking for an idea for a science project? You might not need to understand this particular section of text. In this particular book, there is a wealth of interesting information. You could skip this paragraph and still glean all kinds of great ideas from the book. Indeed, it may be that reading further clarifies this set of ideas for you.

(And as a side note make sure your students know that it can be ok to blame the author. Sometimes, text is tough because it is not well-written (not the case here, but sometimes)! Struggling readers tend to assume that reading struggles are all their fault. But many times, the fault lies with writer for not expressing ideas clearly.)

Jodi Wheeler-Toppen is a former science teacher and the author of the Once Upon A Science Book series (NSTA Press) on integrating science and reading instruction.  She also writes for children, with her most recent book being Dog Science Unleashed: Fun Activities to do with Your Canine Companion. Visit https://OnceUponAScienceBook.com for more information on her books and staff development offerings.

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Hey, Let’s Build a World!

By on February 11, 2019   /   For Teachers, For Writers, Teacher Tips, Writing  

When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher frowned on all fantasy books that hadn’t been written by Natalie Babbitt. We read Tuck Everlasting and The Search for Delicious, which were certainly fantastic, but failed to provide a full grounding in the fantasy genre.

This month, my daughter started a unit on fantasy stories in her fifth-grade class, with an integrated curriculum of reading, writing, and analysis. 2019 might have its problems but this, at least, is an enormous step forward. I take this educational unit as a sign of the inroads of respectability the genre has made. And, of course, the great service J.K. Rowling has done for our society.

Pulling fantasy from shadows shines a spotlight, especially, onto the skill of worldbuilding, the construction of convincingly functional settings in which a story can unfold. Although most vital for fantasy, science fiction, and horror, proper worldbuilding provides a canvas that any story can hang upon.

Proper worldbuilding addresses the unseen 90% of the story world that never makes it into a book, the part that hangs below the surface like the bulk of an iceberg, but which has to exist in an author’s mind in order to make the other 10% feel like it’s happening in an actual place.

When setting a story on an alien planet, or on an altered version of our own world, or in a fantasy land with its own laws of physics, I’ve tended to make up the details as I went along. Random bits of geography, weather, culture, history, architecture, cuisine, fashion, governments, and organizations all hung out in my head, on a scribbled map, and in a jumbled file of digital notes. I called this process worldbuilding, once I eventually heard the term, and my stories usually felt like they were set somewhere. But if readers looked too closely, they could see the rivets of a shoddily constructed facade.

Then I had a revelation that my story, set in a specific time and place, with an alternate culture, a huge cast of characters, and a deep mythology, would require more worldbuilding than I could carry in my head.

My second revelation was that there were specialized worldbuilding tools available that nobody had ever told me about.

My third revelation was that there are active communities of worldbuilders who put a whole lot of time and effort into exploring the strange new worlds that they’ve made up themselves. Some of these worldbuilders build their worlds to support a writing project. Some build their worlds to support tabletop role-playing game campaigns. And, most amazingly to me, some build their worlds just for the fun and challenge of it all!

And it is fun. And it is challenging. And it does get your puzzle-solving mind to wander off in all sorts of interesting directions. And it requires a bit of discipline remain focused on just the necessary parts of a constructed world, and to avoid the excessive breadth and depth they refer to as “Worldbuilder’s Disease.”

So I got myself into worldbuilding. I got my fifth grader into worldbuilding. She got her teacher into worldbuilding. And now their whole class is worldbuilding!

If you care to join us, here are some resources to get you started, or to help you guide your own class of worldbuilding students:

World Anvil

I can’t recommend World Anvil highly enough as a platform for developing and organizing notes on worldbuilding. It’s a wiki-type system where users build a Wikipedia style encyclopedia of people, places, and things in their story worlds. Like Wikipedia, these articles can be organized into categories and can reference each other with links. Even better than Wikipedia, for worldbuilding purposes, there are templates that help in eliciting and developing ideas in greater depth. The free version is quite usable, and premium versions offer more presentation options, storage space, and access control.

Worldbuilding Magazine

Now into its third volume of publishing six issues per year, Worldbuilding Magazine and its archives are free online. Each issue focuses on a different theme and its relevance to the development of an imaginary world. The most recent at this writing is “Death and Taxes,” but previous issues have explored the worldbuilding aspects of Magic, Food, Government, History, and other useful topics.

Worldbuilding Books

Tops on my list to read is Collaborative Worldbuilding by Trent Hergenrader, who teaches worldbuilding co-creation as part of his classes in creative writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Worldbuilding on Social Media

Worldbuilder’s Sanctum is a Facebook group that skews toward tabletop role-play designers and game masters, but includes are many resources and discussions of value to authors as well.

Worldbuilding on YouTube

Worldbuilding Software

If you need a map to visualize your world, Wonderdraft is a specialized graphics program that makes it quick and easy to create some very nice looking maps in a variety of styles.

My Newsletter

Plug, plug! I’m starting a newsletter focused on my writing and worldbuilding, with instructive examples of how the one helps with the other. The first issue comes out next month, but the subscriptions page is live right now!

Other Resources?

Do you have any resources you like to use to help develop, visualize, or organize your story worlds? Share them in the comments!

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