Teacher as Reader: Post 1

The front cover

I am reading Penny from Heaven by Jennifer L Holm. When I look at the front cover of this book, I notice that there is a boy and a girl. They are leaning up against an old car. They must be from a long time ago. They are out in the country because there is a lot of grass, and they have a baseball and baseball glove. They look like they are about ten or eleven years old.

Ch.1

The first page talks about how someone got their name. They say "me" and "my" and "I" a lot, so it must be from their point of view. They talk about people named Me-me and Frankie. Maybe Frankie is the boy on the front of the book. Then, the person tells us their name is Penny. Penny could be the girl on the front of the book.

Ch. 2

There are lots of characters introduced in this chapter. It is hard to keep up with all of them. I will make a list to help me remember who is who. They keep talking about a baseball team. Who are the Dodgers? The names in this book are unusual, and I have trouble pronouncing them. They must be names from another country. It talks about war a lot. I don't know much about this war. Why did we fight Korea and Japan? Penny has a lot of nicknames. Her uncle calls her princess, her mom calls her bunny, but her real name is Barbara Ann. Scarlett O'Hara is her dog's name. Who is Scarlett O'Hara?

Ch. 3

Penny's family is Italian! That is why they have such tricky names. They talk to each other in Italian and in English. They use words like patanella mia which means "my little potato." These Italian words are unfamiliar to me. I should keep a list of all of the ones I have learned. They use a lot of words I don't know when they are talking about baseball. What do they mean when they say, "The mound's looking real good for Dem Bums"? Penny's mom doesn't like it when she plays baseball. Are girls allowed to play baseball during this time? Penny and Frankie run errands for their uncles. The go to Mrs. Wiederhorn's house. She has bruises on her face and her husband yells at her. What happened to her? Pazza is Italian for crazy. I like that word! Italians eat food that is very different. One side of Penny's family eats certain kinds of food and the Italian side eats different kinds. I will pay attention to how this is different.

Ch. 4

Penny has a dream about her father. He died when she was little, but she doesn't know how. I wonder how he died, too. I bet we will find out before the book is over. I can make predictions about what happened to him. These might change the more we read.




What I have noticed reading this so far, is that it the most difficult part of getting into this book is imagining the time period. It talks about the 1950's and even earlier. The students would need to know a lot about what this time is like for it to make a lot of sense to them. I kept reading without looking up more information (granted, I already had a pretty good sense of what it was like) and the information in the chapters helped me to understand what it was like. The front picture also helped me to know what Uncle Dominic's car looked like and what the kids were wearing. I would want to offer more of this kind of evidence to the kids, so they could really understand the time period. I think that it would be fun to give them photos, music, other items to look through from the time period beforehand to let them explore and make inferences about what life was like. Later, we could revisit this at different points in the book to see how they play into the story. Also, Penny from Heaven is the song that Penny is named after, so it would be good to let the students listen to this song and other Bing Crosby songs, so they are familiar with his music.

As a reader, I noticed that I struggled most with words that I wasn't familiar with. The vocabulary I didn't know were the Italian words. The kids will not know these and will likely not know other words in the book as well. The Italian words give definitions with them, so they are easy to understand, but they would not be able to pronounce them. It would be good for them to look them up on an interactive Italian dictionary so they could hear how they are pronounced in Italian. To help them with English words they don't know, we would look at how to use context clues, and how to look up words in the English dictionary to help them.

What I have learned as reader, is that I should write down important things that can help me later. If I write down a list of all the family members of Penny or even make a family tree, I can look back at it later when I get confused about a character. I can also keep a list of the words I don't know so that I can look at it again if that word reappears. I could even keep a graph of things about the cultures of her two different families. This way I could understand how they are different and how this impacts her life.