May flowers and May Baskets

I remember vividly running around our neighborhood, delivering handmade May baskets when I was a little girl. It was such a thrill to hear your doorbell ring only to find your friend racing away, screaming with delight, after delivering a popcorn-filled basket on your doorstep.  Such fun! Now some classrooms participate in this activity delivering popcorn-filled styrofoam cups around school and it’s still cool but it’s lacking that genuine thrill factor. Times change. If you want to bring that excitement back here is a fantastic resource, Create Whimsy, which gives many options over popcorn-filled cups like this plant-filled beauty. Next year I’m going to be prepared and start racing around my neighborhood delivering unique treats. 

May is such a busy month as we work to finish out the school year strong, Groovy Girl has her dance recital coming up, we are looking forward to my in-laws visit, and my husband has two shows in the works. Through all these we have to work to breathe, take care of ourselves, go to yoga (me), and get enough sleep (all of us) to be our best. I have my eye on June but I don’t want to arrive there exhausted.

I’m working on a slideshow about gender stereotypes for 6th grade students for tomorrow and when I finish that task I have an excellent book, The Novice by Taran Matharu, to read. This is a book that a 4th grade student handed me and said I should give it a try. Now he stops in every morning to ask where I am in the story. We have a delightful conversation about the story and then he heads off to class. The part of the month that I dread is telling students that check out is finished for the year. At some point it’s a requirement to get all the books back into the library for the summer yet many of our students are such readers they will resist this news and it fills me with joy and breaks my heart at the same time.

What’s inspiring you today?

April Showers Bring May Flowers; April Reading Recap

Happy May Day!  

Groovy Girl and I usually do the whole May basket celebration, which is something I enjoyed as a child and is now fun to do with her and her friends.  This year we had a church event to help at and didn’t get home until 3-ish and I truly needed a nap.  Needless to say no May baskets happened and Groovy Girl’s answer when I said “sorry”-“that’s okay, mama-there’s always  next year!”  Love her.

I must have been blessed with a lot of reading time this month because I read a whopping 10 books!  This is a lot for me as evidenced by March’s total of four. I generally average about 7-8 so I’m proud of 10.   Also I only count chapter books not picture books, which I read tons of every day for work.  The unfortunate part is that I’ve only reviewed one of them so this first week of May I’m going to attempt to write a post a day about each of these so I can get caught up.  They were all very, very good so writing should be easy.

  1.  Saraswati’s Way by Monika Schrader 
  2.  Moon over Manifest by Clare Vanderpoole
  3.  The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
  4.  The Sister’s Gimm by Michael Buckley 
  5.  Not Your Mother’s Casserole’s by Faith Durand
  6.  The Time-Traveling Fashionista by Bianca (ARC)
  7.  Bitter End by Jennifer Brown (ARC)
  8.  Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
  9.  Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos
  10.  I’ll Be There by Holly Goldberg )

In other news I have a winner to announce….drum roll please…Natalie from one of my favorite blogs,  This Purple Crayon has won a copy of Marc Brown’s Arthur Turns Green.  Quite awhile ago I won a copy of David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy at her blog so I this is a little karmic payback when her name was drawn.  She is an elementary librarian as well and does a lot of reading.  Congratulations Natalie! David  Levithan will be at our public library this week and I plan to get Boy Meets Boy signed by him.

and How was your weekend?