It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 5/12

It's Monday! What are you reading? --From Picture Books to YA--is a weekly meme hosted by Jen and Kellee at Teach Mentor Texts.  Head over to their blog for links to many great blogs and a plethora of good book suggestions.

May just keeps getting busier and busier!  I feel lucky that I am not suffocating under the pile of papers on my desk!  Testing and more testing and grading and end of year stuff and I am SOOO overwhelmed.  On top of everything, we now have a book study going at school which we are trying to squeeze in before the end of the school year and a LOT of my reading time is spent on that.  

I am super excited for this week's author visit from Amy Timberlake.  I have never experienced an author visit in my school and I am ecstatic that I was able to arrange this awesome experience for my students.  

This week I attended the Pitch Dark Days tour at the local library and heard four lovely lady authors speak about their books.  I was so excited to meet Kiera Cass!  I am looking forward to reading the other books I bought and learning more about the other three authors I met: Aprilynne Pike, Elizabeth Norris, and Amy Tintera.  

The other big event of the week was EdCampMke.  I have to admit, I thought about skipping it and going into my classroom instead, but I am so glad I did not skip it!  What an amazing experience!  I am now armed with a whole bunch of amazing and invigorating ideas.  I also actually pitched a session about reading and writing workshop and was able to share info about NerdyBookClub and TeachersWrite.  

All of this extra busy stuff meant that my reading week was a little bit slow, but I definitely think it was worth it.  

Books Finished This Week:

I really enjoyed Madhattan Mystery by John Bonk.  It was a fun mystery and definitely appropriate and fun for middle grades kids.  I love mysteries and am so excited that there are so many being written for younger audiences.  When I was younger, I would have loved that!  

This was such a cute book and I was glad I could read it at the library while waiting for the author event.  It would be a good addition to any elementary school class library.  I can definitely see using this book with middle schoolers as well in order to help them get away from using exclamation marks at the end of every sentence.  This would be a great way to review conventions at the beginning of the year.

I loved this book.  I grew up in Wisconsin and lived in a small town while I went to high school. There were many kids that came from farms and I really appreciate how this book really acknowledges the fact that farming is such a difficult thing to do.  The rivalry between the two high schools is very realistic as well.  I thought the author did a great job with character development and I am really interested in reading her other books now also.  I highly recommend it to students in middle school and up. 

Books I am Currently Reading:

I am still listening to Days of Blood and Starlight.  It is turning out to be quite a dark and heartbreaking story.  I finally was able to start working out again yesterday so I hope to finish this book this week during workouts.  I am also reading the professional book about math instruction that we are using for the book study at school.  

What's Next:

I checked out some books at the library last week that I am really looking forward to.  I will probably read some of those this week.  I also have been wanting to read Rot and Ruin lately so I might pick that up.  I have the books that I bought at the author event as well.  There are so many books on my TBR shelf that I just have to play it by ear or I drive myself insane.  

What are you reading?  Have a great reading week!