Book Lists

Five Books for Middle-Grade Music Lovers

By on January 28, 2015   /   Book Lists  

If you like music and you like middle-grade books, what should you do? Well, the following five books would be a good place to start:

Hiding Out at the Pancake PalaceHiding Out at the Pancake Palace by Nan Marino

Eleven-year-old Elvis Ruby was a musical prodigy expected to be crowned the next winner of Tween Star. Then he froze on national TV. Now, he’s in hiding.

A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban

Ten-year-old Zoe Elias dreams of having a baby grand piano and playing in Carnegie Hall. What she gets is a Perfectone D-60 that comes with free organ lessons and a golden oldies songbook.

The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

Thirteen-year-old Moxie Roosevelt Kipper is tired of being ordinary, and she views her arrival at boarding school as the perfect opportunity to reinvent herself, trying to hide her piano-playing talent in the process.

The Brilliant World of Tom GatesThe Brilliant World of Tom Gates by Liz Pichon

When a fifth grader has his own band called Dog Zombies, you know you’re in for some laughs. (A great book for Diary of a Wimpy Kid lovers.)

Guitar Notes by Mary Amato

Okay. I confess. This book falls into the YA category. But I liked it too much not to include it. Straight-A classical cellist has to share a school music room with trouble-making guitarist. Told through a blend of narrative, notes, songs, and texts.

Have you read a good middle-grade with a harmonica-playing grandpa or a trumpet-toting 10-year-old? A young girl with the voice of an angel? Some other connection to the world of music? Feel free to post the title of a music-based middle-grade that fits with this list!

T. P. Jagger The 3-Minute Writing TeacherAlong with his MUF posts, T. P. Jagger can be found at www.tpjagger.com, where he provides brief how-to writing-tip videos as The 3-Minute Writing Teacher plus original readers’ theatre scripts for middle-grade teachers. He also has a 10-lesson, video-based creative writing course available at Curious.com.

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Let your Mouse do the Walking

By on January 26, 2015   /   Book Lists  

While working on my latest book, I spent many hours wandering around the Library of Congress. Well, not literally, but I did spend a lot of time here.

Maybe I’m showing my age with that old Yellow Pages slogan “Let your fingers do the walking,” but the concept is the same. Nothing beats in-person research, but it may not be possible, depending on your work or family responsibilities, financial situation, or another reason.

Research is important, and it’s easy to do it from your home, with the help of the Internet. Whether you are writing nonfiction or fiction, you need to do your research for a thorough knowledge of your subject matter, to get the details right, or even for inspiration.

Who can look at this photograph taken by Dorothea Lange and not be moved?
Lange

Digital archives lets you travel back in time

wright brothers

Digital archives take you to places you’ve never been.

grand canyon

Sometimes digital archives collect the photos and documents you need and put them into a special collection. Sometimes, they assemble primary sources into lesson plans for teachers.

Bus suggestions

As more and more states, communities, and organizations digitize their collections, it is becoming easier and easier to lose yourself in them. Luckily, many are searchable, and handwritten documents are being transcribed by volunteers so they will be more easily searched.

I urge you to check out the archives associated with the place or time you are studying, teaching, or writing  about. Some of my favorite archives (aside from the Library of Congress) include The Smithsonian Institution and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which collected information on outside agitators activists in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement.

Other sources I like to use for research include Open Culture, a collection of public domain books, movies, classes, and more; Project Gutenberg, a collection of public domain ebooks that are searchable (useful when you need to find a particular passage from Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Doctor Dolittle or Alice in Wonderland);  and of course Google Maps, whose street view feature lets you walk through any town in the world. For example, here’s an image of the apartment building where my husband and I lived in France. It’s not exactly like visiting there in person, but it’s a lot cheaper.

Villeurbanne

Then there are the archives that are a little more esoteric.

Restaurant menus

UFO sightings

Historic children’s literature

Mormon missionary diaries

Postcards from North Carolina

All things medical

Historic advertisements

Radio Shack catalogs going back to 1939

Historic European newspapers

Broadway Playbills

This site describes some fascinating digital library collections.

To get started, here is a listing of hundreds of digital archives, organized by state, as well as directories to help you get lost in find even more.

What are your favorite digital sources and how do you use them? Share in the comments.

 

Jacqueline Houtman is the author of the award-winning middle-grade novel The Reinvention of Edison Thomas (Boyds Mills Press 2010) and coauthor of Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist, a biography for young (and not so young) readers (Quaker Press 2014). 

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