Do you have a Donors Choose project or a #clearthelist wishlist? While I'm certainly not an "influencer," I do have a relatively engaged audience of book lovers, educators, and people who want to help. Reply to this email, send me the link, and I'll share it on Instagram (@middleschoolbooklife). If you want to join the crowd-sourcing fun to upgrade your classroom library, let me help you add 50+ new books through a customized classroom library registry.

Then dive back into summer mode with this lovely poolside read about swimming, sickness, and family.

---

Title: Aniana Del Mar Jumps In​

Author: Jasminne Mendez

Genre: Realistic fiction, novel in verse

Age range: 9+

Summary: Ani loves to swim. When in the water—whether the ocean around her home of Galveston, TX or in the pool for a swim meet—Ani is free and able to fly. But her Mami, plagued by traumatic hurricanes of her youth, fears the water and forbids Ani from swimming. And Ani's own body aches and swells from an autoimmune disease that challenges Ani to accept all parts of herself.

It's similar to:

✈️ Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo: Both are novels in verse featuring families from the Dominican Republic, with a teenage girl main character who loves to swim. Start with Aniana Del Mar in middle school then guide students to Clap When You Land in high school.

🏡 Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga: This is another novel in verse featuring a middle school girl who has to navigate shaping her own identity amidst her family's immigration story and the trauma in her parents' past.

👻 Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier: In this graphic novel, Maya (like Ani) has a disease that prevents her from doing everything she wants to. Both stories depict medical, physical, and emotional impacts of having a chronic illness.

Why it's an engaging addition to your classroom library:

• Ani's Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis diagnosis will be refreshingly relatable to your students who battle chronic illnesses or diseases. They may not be accustomed to seeing their journey of constant doctor's appointments, medications, medical tests, and feeling sick reflected back to them in a book.
• Your young athletes will delight in Ani's competitive swimming. The competitions, the trophies, the scouting—and the setbacks. Physical education teachers, start your classroom library with Aniana.
• Ani's Mami immigrated to the USA from the Dominican Republic, creating a thoughtful storyline of growing up with parents caught between two cultures. If you teach a unit on human migration, Ani's story is a worthy add.
• Maria Tere is Ani's fun-loving, basketball-playing best friend who also likes girls. Her first crush unfolds throughout the story and will be a magnetic storyline for readers navigating young romantic feelings.

---

Literacy Love Notes:

A few weeks ago, I shared an un-fancy Identity Iceberg activity. That got me remembering how helpful it was for teaching my 7th graders about detecting a character's motivations and decisions. I made a fancier version and it's now available on TPT (free for now—price will go up next week).

I love the idea of transforming Back to School night from a teacher presentation to stations. @nowsparkcreativity offers great suggestions for engaging stations for families. More active engagement, hands-on information, and opportunities for you to chat with families.

​@writeonwithmissg is one of my favorite educators on Instagram and I wanted to highlight her five-part series about helping students fall in love with reading: dedicated time in class to read, Book Trailer Tuesday, First Chapter Friday, book buzzer, and stickers.​

Have a good one and learn everything you can,

Hannah

This email includes affiliate links. Any purchases made through them come at no extra cost to you but they do help keep this newsletter free and accessible.

---

Is this your jam? Get more Middle School Book Life in your life:

​

Bookshop.org

Teachers Pay Teachers