Final Blog Reflection

Looking back over all of the posts I have done in this blog throughout the semester, I feel a sense of accomplishment. I feel that I know a lot more about children's literature than I did before I took this class and read all of these books, and I think having to blog about what we read made me read the book differently and think more about how I felt about the book.
Being asked to consider whether or not I would use each book I read in my classroom and to critique each book in a blog entry made me a more careful and critical reader. Even though it was sometimes hard to adequately express why I thought a certain book was amazing (or just mediocre) I think it is valuable to always be thinking about what makes certain literature 'good' for children and what I think readers will be able to take away from a book.
Although I did not put as much effort as I would have liked to into every post I feel I was able to gain a better sense of what kind of teacher I want to be through thinking about and explaining which books I think are important enough for my classroom and why.
Because of this class I have become (re) hooked on children's literature. I am currently reading Karen Hesse's novel Stowaway for fun because I enjoyed Out of the Dust so much. After a few weeks of this semester I began to understand how I was able to read a novel nearly every day in elementary school... children's books are so good! Not only are many of them very easy to get into, they also teach readers a lot about pretty much whatever you want to know about... which in my case is anything as long as it's told in an interesting way.