Secret Coders Series by Gene Luen Yang

"Hopper hates her new school. The kids are mean, the principal is scary, and there's something creepy about the building itself. For instance: why are the walls of Stately Academy covered in the number 9?

Hopper and her friend Eni are determined to get to the bottom of it. but the mystery of Stately Academy has been programmed into its very stones, and it'll take two persistent programmers to figure it out!

Hopper and Eni are about to become secret coders." (back cover of the book)


I want to start this with letting you know, I am not a big fan of graphic novels. I've never really understood the point. I always preferred to imagine the illustrations instead of looking at them in a book. That being said, I loved Secret Coders. Hopper is new to school and all she really wants to do is join the girl's basketball team and not anger her foreign language teacher. She discovers something odd with her school and with Eni she sets out to uncover the odd things about her school.

One thing I absolutely loved about the book is Gene Luen Yang asks the reader to try to figure out the puzzles alongside Hopper and Eni. The way the author explains coding is easy to follow and he makes it fun. Secret Coders has a really fun interactive website that even includes coding tutorials. I can't wait to see how far this series goes and an eagerly waiting for the 3rd book to show up at my library. 

Supercharging Your Storytimes! Workshop by Saroj Ghoting

I had the opportunity to go to a workshop called Supercharging Your Storytimes! that was led by Saroj Ghoting. This workshop was a follow up to the Every Child Ready To Read workshop I was able to attend in December.  We were asked to bring a book that we like to read in storytime with us to use in the workshop and I choose The Loudest Roar by Thomas Taylor. The majority of the workshop had to deal with a project out of Washington state called VIEWS2. VIEWS 2 seems to be a more indepth version of Every Child Ready to Read and the combination of BOTH programs will help me become more intentional in my story time preperations.

For the majority of the meeting, I was gathering ideas and really enjoying what I was learning. The people at my table were fun to work with and we were able to bounce ideas off each other. The only snag my group had was when we were asked to come up with additional ideas to help with comprehension, ideas that were not on the sheet given to us. However, the list of activities and ideas to help comprehension was so exhaustive, that we could not come up with any thing!

Ms. Ghoting's workshop is a wonderful workshop and she supplies a ton of handouts to follow. Her personality is bubbily and inviting. If you have the opportunity to attend one of her workshops, I would highly recommend it. If you can't meet her in person, at least check out her Early Literacy website here. She supplies you with research, ideas and resources to help you with story time. Her website is woderful!