Book Club Post 1 Mentor

Club Name: Team H Book Title: The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake Pages Read: 1-16

What happened in my reading this week:

Beginning of Week: Ms. Saunders starts teaching at Maleeka's School. She used to be in the business world and dresses like she has money. She also has disfiguring scars on her face. Maleeka thinks that she's going to be a problem. "So you see, I got my own troubles. I don't need no scar-faced teacher making things worse. But I got this feeling Miss Saunders is gonna mess things up for me." (pg. 5)

Middle of Week: Maleeka gets made fun of my John John and other students for having dark skin. They sing the "boom, boom song" and she decides that it's time to stand up for herself, but she doesn't seem confident that she can do it.

End of Week: Maleeka and her 'friend' Char cut class in the girls bathroom "like they always do" (pg 9). Char is a troublemaker who takes advantage of Char for her school work. Maleeka does Char's homework but not her own.

Weekly Reflection: Blog about your first impressions of your book (do you like it? Are you intrigued?). What do you think of the way our book clubs are organized? Please describe the way each book club period will work and whether you think it's working well. Please, respond to these questions in AT LEAST SIX SENTENCES. (Note to teachers: it may not make sense to have the students actually copy this into their blog. The prompt could be projected or posted in some other way.)

From the moment I saw the picture on the cover and read the back of this book, I knew I was going to love it. Maleeka Madison has such a strong voice that I was immediately struck by the depth and richness of her character. She's in a bad place right now. Her confidence is low, she's trying to figure out who she is, and things seem to be changing all around her. I think it's going to be an interesting ride.

So far, I think that my book club is going well. Each day, the teacher teaches us a new idea, and then we read our book club books silently thinking about what we learned and filling out the "As you read" sheet. After 20 minutes of reading, we all put our books down and fill out our section of the team book club log on Google Docs. This week I'm the Character Hunter. I have to answer the reflection question that the teacher gave me and write down major things that happen to Maleeka in my reading. As I'm writing, I can check out all the work my teammates are doing too. When we're all down filling out the log, we read each other's writing then have a brief conversation to come up with a "Bring it together" statement that summarizes the WHOLE group's thoughts on the reading from that day. Then on Thursday (TODAY:-)) we use everything we wrote that week in our logs to write a blog like this one.