Fiction Friday (SSYRAs)

        One of my summer bucket list items is to read as many of the Sunshine State Young Readers Award (SSYRA) books as possible.  This will not be an easy task as several of the books will not be published in book form until September and I am just not sure that I want to borrow the hubby's kindle to get the e-books when it will not be useful during the school year to have electronic copies.  I was however able to get a hold of and read three more of the SSYRA books and I am going to use this post to tell you about them as I am fairly certain that you may not have heard these books.

        First up is Guinea Dog by Patrick Jennings.  This book is super cute and one of my favorites so far on this year's list.  It is about a boy named Rufus who wants nothing more than to have a pet dog but his dad is totally against it.  As a compromise Rufus's mom brings home a guinea pig.  You are probably thinking just like Rufus, how is a guinea pig a good compromise when he wants a dog?  If you decide to read the book you will see just how.  This book is a good read for third graders even towards the beginning of the year as the storyline, characters and vocabulary are pretty easily understood.

    
        The next SSYRA book that I had a chance to read was Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer L. Holm.  This book is a Newberry Honor Book and a great example of historical fiction as it is loosely based on a family living in the Florida Keys in 1935.  The author does an excellent job of allowing the reader (specifically kids today) to see how things were in the years after the Great Depression.  The main character, Turtle, is not your typical happy-go-lucky character but you will find yourself rooting for her anyway, at least I did. 

      
       The last book, for this week anyway, is The Familiars by Adam Jay Epstein & Andrew Jacobson.  This book is the first in a series about a trio of young wizards and their you guessed it familiars (magical pets).  I know what you might be thinking, is this Harry Potter all over again?  Well to be perfectly honest I can't answer that intelligently as I have never read any of the books or seen any of the films, I know crazy, but true.  I can however tell you that this book is packed with lots of adventure and while it is three hundred sixty pages long the story really flies by.  As a bit of a warning, there is a LOT of magic mentioned and a ton of higher level vocabulary words so this is not a book I would recommend to just any old third grader even though the interest level is right on target.

 

         Click the picture below to read about many more "must reads" as part of Amanda and The Teaching Thief's blog series:

        I will close this post by saying that I would recommend the addition of all three of the SSYRA books to any intermediate teacher's classroom library, and to quote LeVar Burton, "but you don't have to take my word for it."