Life As We Knew It

This month Bookshoppers read Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, in which the moon gets dunted every-so-slightly closer to earth by a meteor. Choas ensues.

This book is about a disaster, but also about the long, uneventful, difficult, and quieter-than-you'd-think days and weeks that follow a disaster.

After a good discussion (which included a fair share of creepy moon stories and gross medical stories) we began our project.

The bookshoppers used Storybird.com to create storybooks loosely related to Life As We Knew It. Storybird allows users to tell a story using stunning illustrations. The real challenge was concentrating on the text, telling the stories we wanted to tell with our own words and the visuals provided for us. They did a terrific job.

Most of these stories are about the moon in one way or another. All of them are spectacular.

The Moon Journey by Naima

Moon by Jonah

Life As We Knew It by Elliot

Stan's Epic 5-Page Adventure by Kai

Life As We Knew It by Maya

Seraphina





Bookshop is back!  We took a few months off to soak up some sunshine, but we're back! We met this month to discuss the book Seraphina by Rachel Hartman. This books was exciting and full of dragons, and left us with a lot to discuss. We used Pixton.com to create comic strips based on the book. Pixton was great because it allowed up to manipulate the characters and props in its image library to suit our needs, without us having to start from scracth. If you put wings on a dinosaur and squint your eyes...

 

 

 

 



Sanatorium Blues

We read Invincible Microbe: Tuberculosis and the Never Ending Search for a Cure by Jim Murphy and Alison Blank (Clarion Books, 2012) last month, and it was quite a departure from what we'd been reading. Weather disasters and family drama and international espionage are fun to read about when it's fiction, but the danger (sometimes gruesome danger) proposed in Invincible Microbe is the real deal.

Our project was as ambitious as the book choice, so ambitious that it took two sessions to complete. We worked together to create a short film based on the book. Our ideas were grand, and we learned a lot about paring down our visions to a workable place.

The movie depicts some TB patients getting ready for bed in a sanatorium, and was meant to mirror the cover of the book. We were all a little sad we didn't get to include the part where they collapsed people's lungs and then stuffed them with ping-pong balls, but maybe that will be another project, another day.

So, without further ado, I present to you Bookshop's very first film. It's called Sanatorium Blues. Warning, there's a little (LEGO) blood.

Note: A few people have already asked "Is that how you spell sanatorium?!" The answer is it's ONE way to spell it. There are three accepted spellings of the word, including sanitarium, which means (basically) the same thing, but is actually a different word! Sanatorium is apparently the spelling used most often when talking about American and British TB sanatoriums, and is the spelling the authors of the book used.

The Bookshop Pile

We read the book Invincible Microbe this month. We made great headway on the project last night, but it's going to take us two sessions to complete. In the meantime, here's are a couple of titles Bookshoppers mentioned last night. Books they read, books they're reading and books they are looking forward to!

TRAPPED

Holy smokes. This month we read Trapped by Michael Northrop (Scholastic Press, 2011), and I'll tell you this for free: I don't even need to write a little recap because the Bookshoppers did such an amazing job with their book trailers. Animoto.com allowed us to combine words, photos (most of which came from Flickr's creative commons search tool) and music* to produce a little taste of the book we read.

Citing your sources is always a tough but important part of creation -- these kids took to it like pros, and credited all the photos they used at the end of their videos.

Here we go!



NAIMA'S TRAPPED





SAM'S TRAPPED





KEVIN'S TRAPPED





JONAH'S TRAPPED





BETH'S TRAPPED (I went a different route and decided to focus on the trash can fire characters built in the book. Don't ask.)



*This post is dedicated to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor. 

The Apothecary

This time around Bookshoppers read The Apothecary by Malie Meloy (Putnam, 2011). The Apothecary takes place in the late 1940's, and follows the adventures of an American girl who has been uprooted to London. She befriends the son of a local apothecary, and they discover the potions he's been cooking up have some pretty spectacular uses -- and might just save the world.

The Bookshoppers were given the task of composing and recording an old-timey radio ad for one of the products, concepts or locations in the book. We watched a bunch of newsreels, clips from old movies, and era-appropriate radio spots to get in the zone, and had a lot of fun practicing our Transatlanic accents.

One thing that was neat (if not chilling) to see was a newsreel about the House of Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Janie, the main character in The Apothecary, moved to London because her Hollywood screenwriter parents had been fingered as communist sympathizers, and wanted to avoid being called in to testify against their friends.

SO, without further ado, let's see what the Bookshoppers came up with! They all chose to make an ad for one of the concoctions that came out of the apothecary's special book...



Jonah:Invisibility Potion
Sam:Nuclear Bomb Prevention

Naima: Smell of Truth

The Pinballs

Bookshoppers read The Pinballs by Betsy Byars (Harper & Row, 1977) this month. Look at this hideous cover! This book has been around for quite a few years, and has been given a long string of unfortunate covers since it was first written.

To spare them the sight of these monstrous covers, and to inspire them to imagine what they would want the cover to look like, Bookshoppers were given copies of the book that were wrapped in brown paper.

They didn't unwrap the books until they had read and discussed it, and designed their own covers.

Take a look at what they came up with...






The Pinballs by Betsy Byars
Cover design: Sam



The Pinballs by Betsy Byars
Cover design: Jonah

The Pinballs by Betsy Byars
Cover design: Beth
Keep checking back as more covers roll in!