Here's a booktalk for a recent favorite with the sixth graders I see. Published by Orca Currents, it is perfect for middle schoolers who don't much like reading.

Soouueee! Soueeee!
The boy made a loud hog-calling sound and everybody in the class laughs and looks over at the one student who isn’t laughing. His name is Dan, Dan Hogg.
Kids have been teasing Dan Hogg about his last name since, oh, about kindergarten. They also tease him about his bushy hair, his thick glasses, his buck teeth, and the fact that he is so darn skinny.
But the name teasing got a lot worse when their teacher announced the field trip. Their whole class is going to visit a traditional farm. Sadly, it isn’t a dairy farm or a wheat farm, no, their class is going to visit a farm where they raise pigs – a hog farm.
The two hour bus ride is torture:
“Ewww – don’t sit by me, Pigboy.”
“Oink, oink, oink. Dan Hogg. Dan Hogg.”
“Oooooh -- we’re going to see how Dan’s relatives all live out on the hog farm.”
… and things like that.

By the time they arrive at the farm Dan has a bloody nose; somebody shoved his face into a bus window. So you know he’s glad to get off that bus to meet the farmer and see the farm.
Now Dan expected the farmer to be some old guy wearing overalls and a straw hat, scratching his beard and chewing on a piece of hay. But that’s not how he looks at all. This farmer is young, with a shaved head and tattoos on his knuckles. Cool! Dan didn’t know farmers looked like that.
Well, normally they don’t.
In less than an hour Dan will find himself climbing onto the roof of the barn wearing only his underpants, trying to figure out how he can save his classmates, his teacher and the real farmer from a grisly death at the hands of a gun-toting madman.
The only one who can save them is Dan Hogg – the PIGBOY.

Pigboy, by Vicki Grant

Isn't it lovely?

When I'm not driving around the county in my old minivan visiting schools from Troutdale to St. Johns, I'm here at the Admin building in my cheerful little cubicle.

Note the shelf loaded with dozens of books just waiting to be read. If it's a great story and if a paperback edition is available, and if enough copies are available from the distributor, the book might land in your next booktalking program.

Books on the desktop are waiting to be packed into bags for the next day's visit to a lucky 6th grade class.

What you cannot see = books in bins beneath the desk.

Vampires!

This year we added bucket-loads of books about vampires to the collection. Here's one series that should easily sink its fangs into a few middle schoolers:

A hundred and fifty years ago biologists and archaeologists traveled around the world looking for new species of plants and animals and looking for secrets and treasures from ancient kingdoms. They filled museums and books with what they brought back.
But sometimes they brought back a lot more than that.

Jack is a boy about your age. Not as big as a grown man, but old enough to look after himself – good thing too, because he’s lived almost his whole life on the streets.
A lot of the time he hangs out around the river docks. Ships from all over the world arrive there and sometimes interesting things happen.
Once, just after the sun had gone down and the lingering light had faded away, a dark ship on the last of the incoming tide docked there near Jack along the river.
Jack watched and waited – and then he gasped. A huge cloud of flying things poured out of the ship – flying high into the sky over the city. Dark-winged creatures like bugs? No, much bigger. Like birds? No, like bats.
Before he could catch his breath, a tall man with a silver-capped walking stick walked up the gangplank and off the ship. Jack could see at once that this was a gentleman, a rich man.
And then finally, one more thing left that ship: a skinny boy a little younger than Jack. A boy who looks pale and scared, and like he hasn’t eaten in a month.

The boy sits down and tells Jack his story – a tale of science and legend and monsters.
He and his dad had been on a trip to Mexico to study new species of plants and animals and to look for secrets and treasures from ancient kingdoms. The local people there told them to beware, but the scientists thought they knew more. They ignored the warnings and dug into an ancient tomb, and out of it came bats, vampire bats that drink human blood, that can turn other people into vampires and who can switch back and forth from human to bat form and back again just like that.
The winged creatures Jack saw leave the ship are those very same hideous vampire bats, and now they’re in the big city of London, looking for fresh blood and new victims.

Watch your neck! It’s the start of the Vampire Plagues!
Vampire Plagues: London, 1850, by Sebastian Rook.

Percy Jackson rules!

Last weekend I read all three of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books by Rick Riordan. If you haven't yet picked up this series, get ready for a wild adventure through Greek mythology and learn what all of those quarrelsome, mischievous gods and goddesses are doing nowadays. (Hint: they've moved west and are living in America. Mt. Olympus is at the top of the Empire State Building and the entrance to Hades is in Hollywood.) Percy Jackson finds friends, his dad, and non-stop adventure in all three books. Look for book one: The Lightning Thief.

Rainy day books

In prepping for a booktalking program this week I learned a lot about penguins. Amazingly, there are seventeen kinds of penguins and they live in many different places, from Australian beaches to the Galapagos Islands, in icy Antarctica, in South America, down in South Africa and in fern-shaded forests. All of them swim and none of them fly. And they are all black and white, although some are much more nattily dressed than others.
Penguins, by Cheri Winner, North Word Press, 2002.

The other reading treat was a book about foods we eat, mainly weird foods people eat. As an avid listener of the Alexander McCall Smith books on CD about The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency I have heard reference to mopane worms, a delicacy in Botswana. This book has a photo of the worms and describes the cooking options!
The Ate What? The Weird History of Food, by Richard Platt, Oxford Press, 2006.

Library 2.0 has started so I'll be learning something new there too. Apparently I'll have to create an "official" blog on a special site. More details about that later.

Please do visit my del.ico.us page: http://del.icio.us/carolsbooks2u?settagview=cloud

The first five sites I've listed are all about voice care. I talk for a living and find it essential to try and keep my voice in good condition. This can be a real challenge during cold season or during especially busy times. On one of the sites you'll learn that school classrooms are some of the most difficult for speakers because both the students and the room itself contribute a great deal of noise. Remembering the lower level rooms in one elementary school and how the heating pipes made a terrific amount of noise every morning, I know this to be true. Chairs scraping against the floor, hallway chatter, lockers slamming and loud portable fans can almost drown out the booktalker. None of us at BOOKS 2 U lamented the closing of Clarendon School and its 1970s "open plan" layout. Booktalkers had to shout in order to be heard over student chatter and teacher instructions from the other classes in the pod. Hopefully the new school is more voice-friendly!
So check out my links -- it might save your voice!

Start of the New Year

This year we're all supposed to have blogs, so here's to blogging in 2008!
I'll try to share what I'm learning and what I'm reading in a way that hopefully won't be a total bore.
To anyone expecting exciting revelations about the newest, hottest books: BOOKS 2 U buys only paperback editions so my reading list is peppered with a few new books amid a soupy sea of titles published a year or two ago.