Phyllis Reynolds Naylor!

I had the distinct pleasure of attending an author's dinner with Phyllis Reynolds Naylor at the fancy downtown restaurant Chef Geoff's last week (thanks to Scholastic for hosting the event!). As I told my students the next day, it was just like my own Dear Mr. Henshaw moment and I was pleased as punch to sit right next to Ms. Naylor during dinner. She was, of course, entirely sweet and adorable as she asked me about what my students are interested in reading these days (I gave a shout out to Jeff Kinney's DWK series, as I should have given the rate they fly off the shelves in my classroom) and shared stories of her writing life with us. Later in the evening she shared her remarks on her newest book, Faith, Hope, and Ivy June, after which Scholastic gave us each a copy of and she signed them all.
Favorite story of the night: Over dessert, Phyllis asked my table if we would like to hear the story of when she won the Newberry for Shiloh. After a resounding "YES!" she proceeded to explain that she was eating her cereal one morning while her husband was out for a jog when the Newberry committee called her. "You've won the Newberry!" they exclaimed. "But my book only got one star!" Phyllis exclaimed back. After assuring her that they all loved her work, the committee shooed her off the phone so she could answer the forthcoming phone call from The Today Show. After hanging up with the committe, Phyllis admitted that she wasn't sure whether it had all really happened or not. She figured she would just stand and stare at the phone - and if it rang, and if the voice on the other end was from The Today Show, she would know it was true. Sure enough, the phone rang and within minutes she was recieving instructions to pack her bags and get to New York by that evening so she could be on national tv the next morning. After explaining what a shock it was to be expected to be in New York that very same night, Phyllis then said, "My husband says that when he got home from his jog, I was standing on the front porch and I said, 'Rex - I have 24 hours to lose 30 pounds!'"
Many thanks to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor for such a wonderful evening.

Ivy and Bean Take Care of the Babysitter

I love Ivy and Bean books (guided reading level M-N) because they're finally something different than Junie B. Jones - and they're good for a similar low-level reader. The plot formula seems to be the same in each book: Bean gets into a lot of things she shouldn't; somewhere along the way she drags Ivy into the mix; in the end she makes her big sister mad and then maybe will get in a bit of trouble with her mother.
I used to worry about books with characters that set less than stellar examples of behavior for kids (okay, so I still worry about it sometimes) - but what I once read was that it's good for kids to read books where the characters are kids doing bad things, because then the readers get to live out the trouble-making vicariously and not actually do the bad things themselves. So here's crossing my fingers that none of my students start climbing into locked crawl spaces or ruining their neighbors' yards with massive amounts of mud anytime soon...