Penny Noyce

This wide-ranging poetry anthology includes works about everything from ants to exoplanets. A few are familiar, some of them quite old, but most aren't; many were recently written. It's a pleasingly broad mix of voices and styles, some of them accessible, some less so. A few very interesting selections use the words of well-known scientists like Marie Curie and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, arranged by poets to form verse. My only quibble with the book, and the reason I knocked off a star, is for the low quality of the printing; the paper is so thin that words show through not only from the back of the previous page but the front of the one before that, and the format of the book is too floppy and big to hold in one hand for reading aloud.… (altro)

Strap in for a wild ride in this adventure book, where cousins Ivan and Daphne find themselves trapped in a mysterious land in search of missing children. This book immerses children into a magical land of learning both English and math, yet it is so fun they won’t even realize it’s educational. Along the way to find the children who were lost after following a mystical light in the sky the cousins encounter many colorful characters like the Mistress of Metaphors, the Mathemystical, and even a talking thesaurus. Will they be able to find the missing children and escape back to their own world, or will the fog of forgetting engulf them and they will be lost forever like the other children? This could be a great read-a-loud book to use in a 5th or 6th grade class, especially if you are looking for ways to integrate other content areas into your lessons.… (altro)