15th February Hippopotamus Day

If you look at my Pinterest page for hippos you will see that hippos are quite a phenomenon in the world of children's books. They feature not only in traditional nonfiction books, but they are the main characters in narrative nonfiction which relate the lives of real-life hippos such as Fiona and Mzee. They are the stars of great novels such as Morris Lurie's The Twenty-Seventh Annual Hippopotamus Race, they feature in folktales such as those about a tug of war between and elephant and a hippo, they become the brunt of humour and even best friends when you see the series of books Duck and Hippo by Jonathan London and Andrew Joyner or those by Jeff Mack about  Hippo and Rabbit.

Find out about real hippos first:

• The Truth About Hippos by Maxwell Eaton III

• Hippos are Huge!  by Jonathan London

Learn about famous hippos like Fiona and Mzee:

Fiona is a hippopotamus that was born six years ago at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio. She was born prematurely and is famous for surviving. She now has quite a lot of books written about her.

• Saving Fiona  by Thane Maynard

• Fiona the Hippo  by Richard Cowdery

Owen is a baby hippo who was rescued after the  December 2004 tsunami. Villagers in Kenya worked tirelessly to rescue him and he became the best friend of a 130 year old tortoise named Mzee.

•  Owen and Mzee by Isabella Hatkoff

• Mama and Owen  by Marion Dane Bauer

• Mama by Jeanette Winter

Read folktales:

• Hot Hippo  by Mwenye Hadithi

• The Great Tug of War  by Beverley Naidoo

• Clever Tortoise  by Francesca Martin

• Tug of War  by Naomi Howarth

Then have fun reading stories such as these:

• There's a Hippo on the Roof Eating Cake  by Hazel Edwards and deborah Niland

• Happy Hippo  by Charles Santoso

• The First Hippo on the Moon by David Walliams and Tony Ross

• Zippo the Super Hippo  by Kes Gray and Nikki Dyson

• Hilda Must Be Dancing  by Karma Wilson and Suzanne Watts

• The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus race  by Morris Lurie

They even feature in art books. There is a small blue hippo, an ancient Egyptian relic named William  at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He has a book about him

• The Little Hippo by Geraldine Elschner

18th August Book Week Connecting to Reading Part 1

It is Children's Book Week in Australia and the theme 'Connect to Reading' has meant some very insightful reading has been happening in my library. My 5  to 8 year olds have been reading from the Early Childhood and the Picture Book shortlists. We have been connecting these titles to other older books that they may not have known too.

We haven't done any art or craft activities yet. I am saving the Reading to Connect activities for fun in the library this week when we will draw with rainbow pencils and paint with mud, as Ann James does in I'm a Dirty Dinosaur, try to draw a duck in a minute inspired by Silver Buttons and make plastic bag parachutes to float our teddies off the second floor down onto the playground.

So far though we have made text-to-text connections between the two lullabies on the Early Childhood shortlist Baby Bedtime and Kissed by the Moon. We played lullaby music and lay down on the mat as I read.

We read The Swap and connected it to Pat Hutchins 1985 classic The Very Worst Monster which is also about sibling rivalry and the need to get rid of a sibling.

We read Banjo and Ruby Red  and connected it with many books Year1 and I had read last term when we looking at chickens and foxes in picture books and talking about stereotypes. The children thought it reminded them of Albert and Lila,  a chicken and pig story where they help each other to outwit a fox and The Chicken Thief  because 'the hen and fox become good friends'. This connection also led to us reconnecting with Bear and Chook the good friends in Lisa Shanahan's award-winning books.

And although we live near the beach, the concept of grommet was very new to my students, so to read Granny Grommet and Me  we first looked at some surfing books and the news report about granny grommets. One of my students connected this story with Olivia Learns to Surf because in it Olivia is taught to surf by her grandmother. We quickly visited it, but the children were much more interested in talking about sea dragons so that is where we went, off exploring them. The book Seahorses and Seadragons led us to connections of all kinds especially once the students discovered from the maps that they could be found in the sea off Sydney. Next we read another Australian picture book Seadragon Sea  by Margaret Spurling.

The shortlisted Early Childhood books were well received by Kindergarten and Year 1 students, but The Swap  and Banjo and Ruby Red  were the most popular by far when we pretended to be judges and voted, so for once the judges agreed with the children which often isn't the case. It is a fitting tribute to Jan Ormerod to have her last book achieve such an award!

22nd August Children's Book Week

It is Children's Book Week in Australia! Time to celebrate Australian books and all they have to offer children. At school I have been having fun sharing the shortlisted Picture Books and Early Childhood books with classes. We have discussed them, voted for ourselves and argued about why one is better than another. Of course, although we did have voting criteria, it seems inevitable that the children nearly always seem to choose different titles from the adult judges. I think that their main criteria this year was 'humour' as the most popular titles were Bear and Chook By the Sea; The Terrible Plop and Mr Chicken Goes to Paris.

Bear and Chook by the Sea was the winner in the Early Childhood category so the children will be pleased tomorrow when I tell them. Lisa Shanahan and Emma Quay's first book about the unusual twosome of Bear and Chook, Bear and Chook was also popular when it was published so we revisited it too. The children love that the characters are so different in every respect, yet are such good friends. They drew comparisons between them and Minton and Turtle in the Minton books where one character is also adventurous and the other extremely wary and negative. I love it when young children make connections such as this. They also noticed how the characters reversed roles later in the story, both in this book and with the rabbit and bear in Ursula Dubosarsky's The Terrible Plop.

Dubosarsky's rollicking rhyme and rhythm in The Terrible Plop together with Andrew Joyner's illustration's fluid lines give this story a pace and drama that sustains children's interest, intrigue and surprise right to the fitting end where the rabbit is almost heroic. The children will also be pleased to hear that this book won The Crichton Award for new illustration for Andrew Joyner and hopefully this means we will get to see more picture books with his name on the cover.

The Hero of Little Street by Gregory Rogers won the Picture Book of the Year. This is a beautiful book also with an exciting, fast moving story, but it is textless and therefore very difficult to share en masse with a class. It needs concentrated attention, many readings and time to savour its cleverness. It definitely deserved to win. It is the third book in a series of books about a boy which began with The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard.

In contrast Mr Chicken Goes to Paris seems lightweight, but in a school where French is the language taught in Early Childhood classes and Leigh Hobbs is a favourite because of Old Tom and Horrible Harriet, it is not surprising that humour won out when the children voted. I love Narelle Oliver's books and last term we looked at foxes in children's books and character stereotypes, so Fox and Fine Feathers was voted in second place, possibly by those eager to please me!