Mare's War

Bookshop read the book Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis in February. A pair of sisters are sour about spending the summer on a cross country roadtrip with their unconventional grandmother, Mare. Over the course of the trip, Mare tells her granddaughters about how she ran away from home as a teenager in Louisiana and joined the Women's Army Corps. As she describes the challenges she faced as a woman and an African American in the war, her granddaughter's view of their kooky grandma begins to shift.

Over the course of two sessions, Bookshoppers put together a trailer for the book. Enjoy!

Fun with Scratch

In January we read and discussed the book Harry Sue by Susan Stauffacher.

  Bookshoppers had played around with Scratch, a programming language for kids developed at the MIT Media Lab, in our previous session, and this time they were tasked with making an animation in response to the book. Scratch really gives kids the freedom to create characters and scenes that look and feel the way they want them, and with that comes the hard work of figuring out how to move a character across the screen, or develop a scene that matches ones vision.

Here's Jonah's clever take on the Wizard of Oz theme that runs through Harry Sue.