12th -20th September NSW Bike Week

The weather here has been superb. It is Spring and you just want to be outside doing things. On the weekend the Festival of the Winds was on in Bondi. It is NSW Bike Week  from Saturday, 12 September until Sunday, 20 September and there are children in parks, at the beach and on the move. Hopefully it will still be like this in a week's time when it is school holidays. When I think of Spring at school I like to read Will Hillenbrand's Spring is Here to my preschoolers. It is one of the books in the series about Bear and Mole. Coincidently there is a title about kites, Kite Day and another title in the series about bike riding  is Off We Go! Here Bear is encouraging Mole to give up his training wheels. This too is the premise in other titles about bike riding (see list of titles below). 

I am often asked by parents for books about bike riding because their child is fearful and unwilling to take risks. I recommend Jeanne Willis' Don't Let Go! which hasn't failed me yet. Here a little girl persuades her father to teach her to ride a bike. She has all the trouble with balancing and speed control that every learner remembers - but at last she is whipping down the path in the park screaming: 'It's all right - you can let go now!' 

I notice that there has been a number of new books which feature bicycles lately including Byron Barton's My Bike, Everyone Can Learn to Ride a Bike by Chris Raschka and two more about bears on bikes, Bike On, Bear! by Cynthia Liu and Bear on a Bike by Hannah Shaw which is coming soon.

I like to share two books set in Africa with older children who take having a bike for granted,  Galimoto by Karen Lynn Williams and My Rows and Piles of Coins with fabulous illustrations by E.B.Lewis.  These two show how for a child without a bike the yearning for the freedom that comes with a bike is paramount.

And don't forget Mulga Bill's Bicycle. Read it with gusto and explain the history of it and penny farthings.

17th February

Today is Banjo Paterson's birthday so off I went to assembly this morning to talk about him. We had fun with Mulga Bill's Bicycle and I reminded the children that it was in fact Banjo Paterson who wrote Waltzing Matilda. We have two illustrated versions of this poem to choose from. The newer version done by Freya Blackwood even includes a CD with John Williamson singing. Freya does an amazing job at capturing the dry, drought-ridden rural Australia and her illustrations make explaining the vocabulary, such as 'billabong' and 'jumbuck' much easier.

Our school is taking part in the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge as we usually do, but this year we decided that because 2012 is the National Year of Reading we would try just that bit harder to increase the number of children who participate. So far so good. I am spruiking at assemblies. The principal and staff are taking part and writing down on their list every book they read to a class or to themselves. The principal has even written in the newsletter about books that she has read. So far she has written about The Little Refugee by Ahn Do and Bruce Whatley and Ziba Came by Boat by Liz Lofthouse and Robert Ingpen. She shows the children books that she has read or reads an excerpt to whet their appetites and then the children come rushing to the library to borrow them. Today she read the opening sentences of Stuck by Charlotte Calder so of course lots of children wanted to know what happened. The beginning of the school year has certainly started well reading-wise!

17th February A.B. (Banjo) Paterson (1864 - 1941)

Banjo Paterson is arguably the best known Australian ballad poet, probably because he wrote Waltzing Matilda and even though he wrote a long time ago now, children in Australia still know his work. This is made easy for children and teachers because so many of the poems are published as picture story books and come with accompanying CDs. My favourite books are Freya Blackwood's Waltzing Matilda and The Man From Snowy River, but my favourite poem is Mulga Bill's Bicycle and it is easy to explain to children when it is accompanied by pictures such as the humorous illustrations in the version by Kilmeny and Deborah Niland.