Nixon School Media Center
Come expand your imagination, your world and your learning by checking a book out of the Nixon School Library. There is nothing better than reading a book to your child or having them read a book to you. Reading helps children understand new words and how words connect together. Make time to share a book with your child everyday.
Dear Parents,
It is the intention to use this page to build over time, your awareness of the content of a variety of books that are available in the Nixon School library. The expectation here is that you will discover specific titles you feel would be appealing to your children and would like to recommend to them--and hopefully also share with them during reading times at home.
Nixon School Librarian
Nixon School Library Book Circulation PolicyIn order to provide equitable access to our library collection for all of our students—and to encourage respectful use of this community resource—guidelines have been established regarding checking out books when a student does not return previously borrowed materials on time:
In both of the above cases students may choose new books; these are held in the library and are available to them as soon as they return their overdue volumes. Extra library time, for use by all students, is provided during every school day so they need not wait until their scheduled weekly period to return their old and check out their new selections. |
This Month
A Problem Solved?
The various emotions associated with coping with the occasional lost item are regrettably feelings everyone experiences from time to time. It may involve the distressing sense of urgency associated with finding the misplaced house key. The lost item may be less essential, but dealing with it is rankling in a different sense because it simply has to be there...and what about all that is not being accomplished because one’s time must be devoted to finding that which is missing? But have you considered that perhaps the item was not really lost? Rather, perhaps it was “borrowed”—but not by a fellow human being. Perhaps it was “borrowed” by that normally unseen race of diminutive people that reportedly lives in the walls of certain houses and for whom “borrowing” is but a euphemism for stealing from its larger inhabitants—and an essential activity to maintain their daily lives. This possibility is the theme of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, first published in 1952. In it we travel across the ocean and back in time to Victorian England and a country house whose walls are inhabited by people small enough to find a postage stamp to be a perfect picture for their living room walls and a scrap of food to be the basis of an evening meal. Indeed, it is by “borrowing” such items from the house’s larger inhabitants that they furnish their homes and fill their pantries.
This is a work of sophisticated writing that is most suited to our literary-minded fifth-graders-to-be, providing, in addition to the fantasy element, entry into a world of class-consciousness, servants, and gas lights—and the promise of further adventures to read in the form of the several sequels also written by Mary Norton.
For slightly younger students, the same fantasy theme of The Borrowers can also be found in John Peterson’s The Littles. Like Borrowers, the Littles are a small race of people living within the walls of a house, but differ physically by virtue of possessing tails, and in an ethical way through their sense of responsibility: rather than merely taking their everyday necessities from the humans whose house they share, they assume the need to provide compensation, and do so by keeping the wires and pipes in the walls in good repair. As in the case of The Borrowers, there are sequels to the original. This is a more contemporary series, and is not as intellectually challenging.
The Borrowers is also available at the Roxbury Public Library, and although the first in the Littles series is not, it is owned by so many other Morris County libraries that obtaining it on interlibrary loan would probably not be a problem.
Good Books for the Month
More About Unusual or Threatened Animals
Kindergarten: The Seashore Noisy Book, by Margaret Wise Brown
First grade: Arthur’s Family Vacation, by Marc Brown
Second grade: The Sea View Hotel, by James Stevenson
Third grade: Betsy’s Busy Summer, by Carolyn Haywood
Fourth grade: Samantha Saves the Day; A Summer Story, by Valerie Tripp*
*Also available at the Roxbury Public Library; call number: JFICTION/AMERICAN/SAMANTHA