Erik Sagrero – Keena’s Little Lie

I selected Keena Ford and the Second-Grade Mix-Up written by Melissa Thomson, this is the first book of a three book series. Since it’s the first book of the series we’re introduced to a second grade student by the name of Keena Ford. Other central characters that are included are Keena’s parents, Brian her older brother, Mr. Lemon, Miss Campbell her teacher, Eric her best friend and Tiffany. Keena was given a journal as a reward for receiving good grades and having good behavior in the first grade. This journal is the key focus of the book because it features all her daily thoughts about the struggles and also the good things that the second grade has brought her. The hardships she’s faced with range from being separated from her best friend Eric, have to drink tea that taste like “wet paper bag” with a classmate names Tiffany, hiding under a teachers desk, and even hurting her teachers feelings. Keena’s biggest mistake was the she may have possibly stretched the truth by allowing her teacher Miss Campbell to believe that her birthday is September 2nd (9/2) instead of February 9th (2/9).

I really enjoyed the book from beginning to end. I would recommend this fiction book series to any student in elementary, it’s not a challenging book per se but it introduces students to ideas of how to use a journal by reading the book. This book works for teachers and students well because it shows two different perspectives. The first being a students perspective which shows that they focus and take interest in small things and create a bigger picture, for example Keena believed her life was going to be heavily impacted when Eric and her were placed in different classrooms. The second perspective is a teachers or in this Mr. Lemon, who realized that Keena wasn’t being honest and lied about her birthday because she was interested in wearing the crown and getting a piece of the chocolate cake. Mr. Lemon teaches Keena that you have to be honest and when you make a mistake you have to take ownership of it and apologize to anyone who was affected by the lie.

In my classroom I would definitely  include two things that were used in this book, the idea of journal usage and writing letters of apology. Using a journal allows students to express themselves and it gives them a way to get their ideas in a way thats personalized for each and every student. Writing letters of apology works well because its a way for students to practice their writing but most importantly it’s a way for them to become responsible for their actions. There were other ideas that were introduced in the book would be as usefully but these two concepts were the two that caught my eye.

In the first chapter of Reading in the Wild there were many ideas that would be beneficial in a classroom. Independent reading that allows students to select a book of their choice, this is important for creating good reading habits. Reading becomes less of a burden to students when they are reading something that they are actually interested in. Another good idea was the use of Status of the Class reading logs as a way to see the progress of students engagement, reading levels and genre preferences makes it easy to recommend books thats they’ll enjoy. Miller provide material that’ll make it easy to enhance or create positive reading habits. I’m excited to see what types of book genres my future students will be reading and helping them build their reading skills which is something they’d use in their everyday life. I am afraid of the not being fully prepared for reading level differences that will vary between every student.