Exploring Learning

The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson It might be safe to say that I inhaled this book and its incredibly crafted story, breathing out the smoke of words I digested and chewed over, coating my classroom in metaphors both grotesque and moving. This novel was the first of the Book a Month Challenge myself and my PLN established on Twitter, and I enjoyed this novel both as a reader and as a teacher. My learners noticed my reading it around the corridors; parents stopped me in the car park to ask what I was reading and to make sure I didn't walk into anything. An intriguing and moving novel about an intense father-daughter relationship of trauma and heartache, Amazon describes it as "Laurie Halse Anderson at her finest: compelling, surprising, and impossible to put down" - I guess I cannot disagree. I have taken and used many passages to teach figurative language as the writing demonstrates metaphor and personification in a complex yet access...

Boxers and Saints boxed set Boxers and Saints by Gene Luen Yang Boxers and Saints are two graphic novels that tell the same story from a different perspective of one of the most controversial episodes of modern Chinese history. I read Saints first. In this beautifully illustrated graphic novel, the protagonist is a young girl who, born as the fourth and only surviving child, on the fourth day of the fourth month is deemed bad luck. Synonymous with death, Four Girl is shunned and miserable in a village that has no place for her. She is taken in by Christian missionaries and finds, for the first time, a home with them. As the Boxer Rebellion gains momentum, Vibiana (as her new name is given to her by the foregin devils) must decide whether to abandon her Christian friends or to commit herself fully to Christianity. Boxers tells the opposite side of the story from the perspective of Little Bao, a Chinese peasant boy whose village is abused and plundered by West...