My poem book is Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings by Margarita Engle. These poems tell a story about a girl (Margarita) and her families. Her mother is from Cuba her father from Ukraine and they live in Los Angles. Through the poems Margarita portrays the beauty of Cuba and the fear of the Americans fro the Cubans during the revolution in Cuba. Margarita loves Cuba and it’s tropical setting. She struggles with finding herself with being from two different cultures and living in Los Angles there are two different personas she takes her North American she self  and her Cuban self.  One really understands her feelings about what is happeing in Cuba she feels like an outsider but also still feels like she belongs. There is that in between feeling where she knows where she is from but also struggles to stay with the roots of  her mother. Margarita loves Cuba.

This memoir is a very easy read but the content is certaily for a middle schooler maybe fifth and sixth graders as well. Some poems I read faster than the otheres depeding on the content and mood that is being set.

Cento:

Homesick, she sings to herself in spanish.

There is only one place

she truly belongs

she feels at home even though this peaccful town is not her own

And now coming back home

isn’t really coming back

AT ALL.

“Wild reading is: readers who incorporate reading into their lives along with everything else that interests them”(3)

“All or Nothing– never learning that a daily reading habit built on managing time to read matters more than how many minutes they(the student/reader) read in one sitting” (13)

Miller’s book is spot on pointing out the struggles of students who do not like to read, find it boring, or just plain do not want to do it. I speak from personal experience, as I read all her identifiers for fake readers I thought I would do every single one of those all through out grade school. I do not consider myself a reader there has been very few times that I did and those few times I remember the names of the books I read to completion because it is so rare. I am the book abandoner I have about 15-20 books at home and I can admit to only having read about 5 of them. Many cases was just the not having time to read because of other obligations. The five books I have read form beginning to end I have binge read and all fell under the young adult genre. I remember one of the big things for me was the concept of “all or nothing” I had to read for the time my teacher assigned to me or I would not do it. It was not until my semester of college that I understood reading even for those 10 minutes I had waiting for a dr appointment or etc made a difference

I have lots of experience working with children in school settings and have seen fake readers blossom into wild readers do to finding the right book. It took lots of trail and error abandoning books many times of fake reading but when a student finds a book that really engages them you almost have to pry it away from them to get them to stop. That is some thing I find exciting when it comes to teaching reading the moment you know that child is hooked you know they might not ever look back and jut opened the doors for them to a whole new world of reading.

 

No shoe to be slipping on thousands of girls

A prince that is withering away over love

a lover prepared to give up all his riches

a family that reunites for a happily ever after ending