Quick Hit Book Reviews

Hola!  Over my break I read three books and I want to give you a quick review of each...

Royce Rolls by Margaret Stohl - This is a Young Adult novel.  Margaret Stohl and Kami Garcia wrote the Beautiful Creatures series that I really liked.  This book is a play on Keeping Up with Kardashians.  The Royce Family all have car names.  Bentley the middle daughter of Mercedes Royse.  Her older sister Porsche is second in line to Mercedes throne.  Bentley has been cast as the problem child in their reality show drama.  Her best friend is her younger brother Maybach but really she's alone.  The book is written as a script of sorts.  We get to know the real Bent, how she feels about her family and it's fame.  I'm not a Kardashian fan so parts of the book were totally foreign to me.  But it's a great story about family.

Audacious by Beth Moore - and the pendulum swings from YA fiction to Christianity.  I love Beth Moore. I'd like to be a Beth Moore Jen Hatmaker combo.  They both love Jesus and speak real truth.  Audacious is about audaciously loving Jesus.  Now that's something I can get behind!  My favorite quote is "The person you are when you love Jesus with everything in you - with your whole heart, soul, mind and strength - is the real you."  This is who I want to be - the real me who loves Jesus with everything in me.  That's a big piece of my live love{d}

The New Pillars of Modern Teaching by Gayle Allen - this is a book for work but I really love it.  I think we've established that I'm a super nerd so this right up my alley. It's a quick read and when you're agreeing along the way, it goes that much more quickly.  Allen asserts there are 3 new pillars of teaching - design, curation and feedback. We should be guiding students to learn how to design their own educational experiences.  This one is still rolling around in my head.  We are still responsible for the state standards.  How can we let students design their learning within the state mandated standards?  We should also be teaching kids to curate information.  Think about a museum curator - they search through all the artwork and artifacts and decides what's the best.  With so much information at their finger tips, we have to teach kids to sort and save.  They also need to tell good information from bad information.  Finally, we must provide feedback to students and teach them how to utilize feedback.  They must know the difference between criticism and feedback. 

I'm currently reading Give and Take by Adam Grant.  I can't wait to tell you about that one! Very insightful!

What have you read lately?