Growing Bookworms Newsletter: Crossword Puzzles, Playful Learning + Middle Grade Reviews

Today, I will be sending out a new issue of the Growing Bookworms email newsletter. (If you would like to subscribe, you can find a sign-up form here.) The Growing Bookworms newsletter has refocused recently, and now contains content from my blog focused on growing joyful learners, including bookworms, mathematicians, and learners of all types. The newsletter is sent out every two to three weeks, and is being sent a day early this week due to schedule constraints on my part.

Newsletter Update: In this issue I have three book reviews (two middle grade books and one for adults) and two posts about my daughter's latest literacy milestones (doing crossword puzzles and understanding the ending of an ambiguous books). I also have one post about playful learning: throwing away the instruction manual. I also have two posts with links that I shared on Twitter, and two more with quotes from and responses to links about to the joy of learning. 

Reading Update: In the past two weeks I read/listened to one early reader, four middle grade, and four adult titles. I read:

• Barbara Park: Skinnybones. Yearling. Middle Grade Fiction. Completed April 20, 2016. Review to come of the two Skinnybones books.
• Barbara Park: Almost Starring Skinnybones. Yearling. Middle Grade Fiction. Completed April 20, 2016.
• Jacqueline Jules (ill. Kim Smith): Sofia Martinez: My Family Adventures. Picture Window Books. Illustrated Early Reader Collection. Completed April 21, 2016. Review to come. 
• Virginia Zimmerman: The Rosemary Spell. Clarion Books. Middle Grade/Middle School. Completed April 23, 2016. Review to come. 
• Sarah L. Thomson: The Eureka Key: Secrets of the Seven, Book 1. Bloomsbury USA Children's Books. Middle Grade Fiction. Completed April 29, 2016, print ARC. Review to come.
• Paul Doiron: Trespasser (Mike Bowditch, Book 2). Minotaur Books. Adult Mystery. Completed April 20, 2016, on MP3.
• Paul Doiron: Bad Little Falls (Mike Bowditch, Book 3). Minotaur Books. Adult Mystery. Completed April 25, 2016, on MP3. 
• Todd Rose: The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World that Values Sameness. HarperOne. Adult Nonfiction. Completed April 25, 2016, on Kindle. This book was very interesting. I am working on a write-up. 
• Jacqueline Winspear: A Dangerous Place: A Maisie Dobbs Novel. Harper. Adult Mystery. Completed May 2, 2016, on MP3.

I'm currently listening to Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear and reading The Bishop's Wife by Mette Ivie Harrison. I have a business trip coming up, so I expect to get some good reading done next week. 

The books my husband and I (and our babysitter) have been reading to our daughter in 2016 can be found here. April was a good reading month for us. We turned in a healthy reading log comprising more than 160 titles. I think that the funniest reading moment for me was last week, when my daughter came down from my office with her nose buried in The Truth About Twinkie Pie by Kat Yeh (a middle grade novel that is pretty clearly about my daughter's current reading level). She insisted that she could read it, and was on page 3.

However, when we asked her what it was about, she couldn't say, explaining that she was working so hard to understand the words that she couldn't follow the story. I told her that she was welcome to read the book, but that she might get more enjoyment out of something a bit easier to decode. I then told her (somehow for the first time) about the Lunch Lady books by Jarrett Krosoczka. She loves spying and gadgets and the like, so I thought it would be a good fit. And it is. She's working her way through Book 1, Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute, determined to read it herself. 

And that, my friends, is why it's a good idea, if you can swing it, to have various books around the house. Because you never know when a particular book will catch your child's interest. 

Thanks for reading the newsletter, and for growing bookworms. 

© 2016 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. You can also follow me @JensBookPage or at my Growing Bookworms page on Facebook.