Update: Congratulations to Anamaria Anderson, who is our winner!
As I did with May B., I am donating to one lucky school, library, homeschool co-op, or reading circle a Blue Birds Book Club Kit. The kit will include the following:
- 10 copies of Blue Birds
- teacher / discussion guide
- bookmarks and stickers for all readers
- interactive Skype visit
Grades four through eight qualify. To enter, simply tell me about your readers and why Blue Bird is a good fit for your group in the comments below. That’s it!
The contest is open to US residents only. Winners will be announced March 27. Thanks to G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers for providing the books.
I would donate this book club kit to our local library. They do book club kits but not many for young adults. I can see a group of jr. high girls getting together with their Blue Birds books and having a lot of fun together. 🙂
Sarah M
Blue bird is a great fit for my daughter’s school. Floranada Elementary, located in East Fort Lauderdale, FL, is a Title One school with very little money for resources and wonderful reading incentive programs like this. Yet, the teachers, principal, and students are all very passionate about reading, and do whatever they can to get their hands on new, relevant reading material. Currently, I’m putting together a basket of books (signed author copies) to be raffled away at a fundraising event, because many of the children that go to Floranada have no books of their own to read at home (several of them live in homeless shelters, or in unstable familial environments.) I would love for them to be eligible for your kit…the book sounds amazing and I love that you’re doing this. Thank you! 🙂
Jill MacKenzie
jillmo98@hotmail.com
I would use the books in my school library with my “Book Jackets” book club. My students really liked May B. and I am sure they will enjoy Blue Birds as well.
Our homeschool coop has a tight-knit group of girls that would love to have an excuse to get together to do something a little more fun and free-form than our regular fare. I would love to set up and host a book club for Blue Birds if we won the set. They work really hard all year and the last day of the year is the first week in April so this would be a perfect, extended summer activity!
The students I work with are in middle school and include all grades which is 6th through 8th. The students in this program have intellectual disabilities, autism, specific learning disabilities, and other special needs not listed here. We have a self-contained classroom environment, so they stay in the same classroom throughout the day except for an elective period. My students are a lot of fun and have very creative personalities. They are learning life skills, social adaption, literacy, art, and other core subject areas in this classroom environment. I emphasize reading in my classroom and have a reading tent set up to encourage a love for reading. The school is a Title I school and access to resources is limited. The school is located in the south valley in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area.
I would love to get a set of your wonderful Blue Birds books, and have this set in my classroom for years to come! It would serve as a great learning experience to read through a book together as a class and create reading circle activities…the possibilities are endless! 🙂
Thank you!
Mrs. Isaac
Functional Skills Teacher
Harrison Middle School
I teach at a middle school and one of the extra curricular activities I sponsor is Battle of the Books. This novel would be a great fit for the group of girls (grades 6-8) in the club. We already function as a small book club having read books for the Battle of the Books this year, along with other activities. The novel Blue Birds along with the kit is a good resource I can use with this group, so we can all read and discuss the same book at the same like a traditional book club, which is a great experience. (This is not to discredit what we have done with books for the battle; it’s just that the group read those all at different rates and times due to not having a set of any one particular book, so our “book club” experience has been a little different.
It would be wonderful for this group of female students to read and experience this novel all together as a group at the same time. The book set and kit would make this possible.
I’m leading a book club for a group of fifth-grade girls at a public elementary school in Arlington, VA. Blue Birds would be a great fit for us not only because of the historical place and period in which it is set, which they’re familiar with from the Virginia Studies curriculum–but because cross-cultural friendship is something they experience in their diverse community as well. It’s a beautiful book and we very much look forward to reading it in any case! Thank you so much for this opportunity.
Hi, Caroline! I work with students in 10 elementary schools in York County, Va., who live right near Jamestown. I preordered and have already read this lovely story. The fact that the setting of Blue Birds is so close to our home automatically will allow our children to be able to relate to the book; however, what reading this book will really allow them to do is delve further into a part of history that they are not used to studying: The good and beautiful relationships that occurred across cultures. As a result of being exposed to such relationships, it will encourage them to be brave enough to apply the lessons learned to their daily lives and use this model of friendship to guide them as they navigate and form their own friendships. Inevitably, isn’t that one of the most important jobs we have as teachers? To teach tolerance? Your book will give us what we need to continue having these sorts of discussions. In addition, student research is a big part of their curriculum. Your Skype conversation would allow them a view into the work of an authentic researcher. They would learn the patience and persistance that are both required to uncover the details needed to bring a story to life. I do hope you will consider our school system, not just one classroom, to be the recipient of a set of your beautifully written Blue Birds.