I read A LOT of books! Typically, considering that I want to be an elementary teacher, and because it's a habit of majoring in elementary education and wanting to also write children's books, I tend to read a lot of children's books. I don't know what it's like for others who majored in the education field, but the way you could identify an elementary education major at my university was by seeing if they left the university library with an armful of children's books - all of our assignments typically required at least one children's book! As someone who also worked at my university's library, it was always amusing to check books out to education majors, because I knew that if they came to the desk with a lot of multicultural books for children, they pretty much were doing it for a particular class that required us to read and annotate at least 25 multicultural books for children! My university's library, for me, was the only place you wouldn't be judge leaving with The Little Engine That Could! For instance, after checking out loads of children's books at my public library, the following visits I checked out a chapter book only to also receive a comment, "Wow, I thought you forgot to read big books!." Nonetheless, because I want to teach elementary students and am Reading Endorsed, and because I eventually write children's books, I feel that it's important to read as many children's books as I can!
My favorite children's book at the moment just so happens to be WONDER by R.J. Palacio. The book is a very new book, only just released this past February, and is the author's very first novel. It's a book filled
with varied emotions, partly due to it being split into "parts" interchanging with several of the story's characters' viewpoints. While it's split into several character point of
views and different age-ranges, it revolves around the character of August Pullman
(Auggie) who was born with a genetic disease that leaves him with a
facial abnormality. When the reader first opens the book and starts to read Auggie's perspective, you just want to hug him and love him just as much as the other character's do! Moreover, the message in the book really is important for today's students, as it deals with the concept of accepting others who may seem different, and to stand up against bullying. Due to the concepts of the book, it is a book appropriate for 3rd-6th grade.
It's a good book to have a 10-15 minute read aloud per day, as the chapters aren't long (the longest chapter, I think, wasn't over 5-6 pages). I'm not the only one who thought about this considering that I've discovered that a lot of teachers are using this book as a read aloud - one teacher, in fact, went as far as creating blog entries for his class! Even I imagined myself teaching 5th grade next year just to use this book as a read aloud. That's how wonderful WONDER really is for readers!