Mark your Day....

Cynthia Rylant is everyone's favorite author... and this book is another example of why we hold her writing so near and dear to our hearts!  When I read this book for the first time, I fell in love with it... my background experience kept racing through my mind (summers on the ranch, feeding chickens, etc).  Cynthia Rylant has a way of doing that, of capturing the reader's mind and heart with the simplicity of her words.  In this book, we are nudged to see a perfect piece of time to live a life... to plant a seed.
     This book is the gracious nudge to remind children to think about hope, kindness, and special moments.  I've used it to invite children to do a line lift or a memory write in their reader's/writer's notebooks.  Plenty of seeds have been planted because of Rylant's words.  It's superb mentor text.

     The artwork in this book is remarkable, black paper cut in lovely silhouettes.  Simplicity at it's finest.  But yet the beautiful, intricate detail is an almost lost art form.  Nikki McClure is brilliant!
     I love the language in this book You can make a wish, and start again and The past is sailing off to sea, the future's fast asleep.  A day is all you have to be, it's all you get to keep.
     So get this book... and remind your students to, as my friend Randi Allison says, "mark your day."  Today is the only October 10, 2009 they will ever have...