Snow Dogs: Racers of the North by Ian Whitelaw

Posted on 01/13/2012

Winning, much less surviving, sled racing in Alaska’s icy cold solely depends on the integrity of the team of snow dogs. This special breed of canine is bred for endurance, dependability, and fortitude unlike no other. Ian Whitelaw’s Snow Dogs: Racers of the North invites the reader into the fascinating world of dog sledding and celebrates the animal that makes the sport possible.

To enrich the child’s reading experience, we have found a number of on-line resources guaranteed to bring the sport to life! Iditarod.com hosts the sport’s official site, which is brimming with videos, facts, and history…a site any young musher would love to see. The Iditarod Trail Committee hosts an educational site loaded with cross-curricular activities such as Reader’s Theaters, quilt making, science experiments, and art lessons for starters. And Scholastic.com hosts a site featuring a charming video about a young woman who ran the historic Serum Run. We, at ReaderKidZ, find the latter endearing as it illustrates the loving bond of a dog sled racer and her team in a practical, heart-felt way.

Trapped by the Ice! by Michael McCurdy

Posted on 01/11/2012

To compliment the earlier Book Room post featuring Trapped by the Ice, written and illustrated by the talented Michael McCurdy, access the following links for a multi-sensory re-enactment of the perils that transpired when Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed the ship, ironically called the Endurance, across the frigid waters of the Antarctic. Kodak.com has compiled an incredible slide show featuring original photographs to tell the tale of a ship crushed in an ice pack and the unbelievable two-year survival of a crew of 28 men.

You might like to access Nova’s on-line edition of Shackleton’s Voyage of the Endurance which is complimented by a cross-curricular Family Guide and Teacher’s Guide.  Or study the chilly vocabulary of survival compiled by The Davis School District in Farmington, Utah.

Anyway you chip away at it, Shackleton’s icy story is unforgettable!

In a Land of Ice and Snow

Posted on 01/08/2012

ICE FALL by Matthew Kirby (Scholastic Press, 2011)

Adventure comes in all shapes and sizes. For Solveig, adventure arrives unexpectedly. Accompanied by her siblings, she’s been sent by her father, the king, to a steading in the cold Nordic North. While they wait, believing that their father will defeat the enemy and call them to return home before the full force of winter arrives, things turn ominous for the children. A dreker, a dragon-headed ship of war, has moved up the near-frozen fjord carrying berserkers, animal-like warriors of the king. In the shadow of a glacier and with this uncomfortable company, the children must wait out the frigid winter.

The food dwindles, winter drags on, and a air of darkness descends on the steading. A traitor is in their midst and Solveig, who has begun to recognize her gift as a Skald, must grapple with this news and the dreams that have begun to haunt her in the middle of the night.

TRAPPED BY THE ICE by Michael McCurdy (Walker Children’s, 2002)

Imagine. It’s 1915, the end of October. Sir Earnest Shackleton’s main goal ten months earlier had been to become the first person to cross the South Pole’s ice cap. But now his ship, the Endurance is trapped. He and his men are stranded hundreds of miles from the nearest land and the Endurance is leaking badly.  The only hope for survival is to live on the ice.

This account of Shackleton and his crew’s trek across snow and ice, charging sea leopards, splitting ice floes, storm-tossed seas, and a final dangerous climb over treacherous mountains make this story of perseverance in the face of incredible hardship a book no fan of real-life adventure will want to miss.

SNOW DOGS: Racers of the North by Ian Whitelaw (DK Publishing, 2008)

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to travel over an Arctic landscape on a sled pulled by a team of huskies? Snow Dogs takes young readers behind the scenes and opens up the world of sleds, dog teams, mushers, competition, and survival in one of the coldest, most brutal climates in the world.

 

Red Sled

Posted on 01/05/2012

A little bundle of a girl in a white coat and a red hat leans a red sled against a small cabin surrounded by snow, and a glorious, heartfelt journey begins. A brown bear spots it and takes it for a ride. He’s joined by a rabbit, and a porcupine, and a moose … using delicate, beautiful illustrations that need no words, author/illustrator Lita Judge has created RED SLED, an exuberant picture book about winter and friends and the excitement of whooshing down a snowy hillside, shrieking for sheer joy. Children will delight in bringing their own story to this one and, from the first magical page, will almost hear the snow falling and the crunch of snow under their own feet. The smallest child will love this book, as will grown-up children of all ages. Truly a “three-to-ninety-three” experience.

Welcome to ReaderKidZ, January 2012

Posted on 01/01/2012

Happy New Year! January 2012 at ReaderkidZ is all about FANTASY and ADVENTURE.

ReaderKidZ is proud to present RICHARD PECK as Author-in-Residence this month. His latest novel, SECRETS AT SEA, is a fantastic adventure involving charming corseted matchmaking mice aboard a great ocean liner due to reach England in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

The mice live with the wealthy, but comic and all-too-human Cranston family, headed for London to find suitable matches for their two daughters.  Mrs. Cranston in particular says all the wrong things with, as described by one passenger, “a voice like the cawing of a crow.” The mice sisters, Helena, Beatrice and Louise, and their pesky brother Lamont, hate water, but loyally accompany their human family tucked away in their steamer trunks. Helena and her siblings work feverishly behind the scenes, relying on every rodent social connection they can muster to compensate for the clumsy Cranstons, and match-make for the deserving Cranston girls. It all unfolds amid a swirl of romance and royalty, ball gowns, the ship’s cat, and many coursed-meals, whether with humans at the Captain’s table or at the mice’s yardstick table on thread spool seats.

To the reader’s happy satisfaction, mice and humans both find plenty of adventure at sea. Best of all, Peck’s trademark dry humor and sly sense of fun are in full play on every page.

Read What’s Your Story, Richard Peck? HERE.

For more about Richard, visit his publisher’s site HERE.

Richard’s Story

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My first years of school were during World War II.  In fact I marched into kindergarten the week Hitler marched into Poland.  But I was better prepared than he.  I’d had a mother who read to me, and so I couldn’t wait to get to first grade.  I thought we’d be reading by the end of the first day.

That didn’t quite happen, but by the end of that year, somehow, we could all read, all forty of us in Miss Welch’s room.  Possibly because it would have been unpatriotic not to.

The theme of every school day was The War Effort, and every kid was expected to play a part.  We spit-shined the shoes we wore with our Cub Scout uniforms.  In music class we learned “Nothing Can Stop the Army Air Corps” and the “Marine Hymn.”

We recycled everything in sight.  And we learned geography, still my favorite subject, from classroom maps, bristling with pins where the war was happening.

Years later I was a soldier, in Germany, and I saw for myself all that geography, all that history we’d learned in our wartime classrooms.  But that’s what schooling is: a road map pointing toward your future.

What were you afraid of ?

I don’t want to say it out loud, but you’ll find it somewhere in Secrets At Sea.  Something that makes me really, really afraid.  Really.

Did you play an instrument?

I did.  It was the Sousaphone.  I was stuck with the biggest, heaviest instrument in the marching band because I was six feet tall in the seventh grade.

I staggered under that thing all the way through high school and marched down the football field on Illinois nights so cold our lips stuck to the mouthpieces.  I was not very musical.

Do you have a special place to write?

I do. When I was young and dreaming, I dreamed of living high up in a building overlooking the glittering electric skyline of New York City.  My dream came true, and here I am this moment at my writing desk looking out over the nighttime city, sparkling with light and stories.

Download a copy of Richard’s Story HERE.

Read “Your Friend, Richard Peck (A Letter to Readers)” HERE.

For more about Richard Peck, visit his publisher’s site HERE.

Your Friend, Richard Peck

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Dear Reader,

Welcome to the journey and All Aboard my newest book.  The title, SECRETS AT SEA, announces the story of a voyage.  And those characters on the cover are Helena and her sisters Louise and Beatrice and their brother Lamont.  All with beady eyes and long gray tails.  Mice.  And any story of mice, any mouse tale, has to have a cat–a ship’s cat, one-eyed and raggedy-eared.

I can’t tell this story.  I’m too big to live within the walls and to fit under doors and to travel in the handkerchief drawer of a steamer trunk.  And so Helena, the oldest-sister mouse, spins this yarn about a family setting sail for the adventure of their lives.  A voyage to find their futures.

All my stories are about journeys, and I’ll tell you why.  I met two boys when I was in fourth grade at Dennis Grade School in Decatur, Illinois.  I didn’t meet these boys in class; I met them in the library, within the covers of a book.  Two boys on a raft down the great American river, two boys on the journey of their lives.

They were Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  As soon as I read that book and floated off downriver on that raft with those boys,  I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I wanted to live in a magic world of words.  I wanted to read and teach and write and read some more.

Nobody but a reader ever became a writer, and I reread  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  every year.  And every year it’s a different book.  It lives on my desk, a companion in the quiet world of sitting in an empty room, listening for the voices of your characters.

Once upon a time, sixty-eight years ago, I opened a book and fell into my future.

I hope the very same thing happens to you.

Sincerely,

Richard Peck

Download a copy of “Your Friend, Richard Peck (A Letter to Readers)” HERE.

For more about Richard Peck, visit his publisher’s site HERE.