1st June World Milk Day

World Milk Day is an international day established by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations to recognise the importance of milk as a global food. 

During COVID19 at school we are making students take books from a display, so as to avoid too much touching or rummaging on shelves, so we are making sure there is plenty on display.  There would be five or six topics displayed at a time so when the students come tomorrow they will be greeted with a book display for World Milk Day. We were surprised just how much we had, about five books with 'milk' in the title, but when we extended it to cheese and cows there was an abundance.

Here's some milk titles:
• Don't Spill the Milk  by Stephen Davies
• Milk and Cookies by Frank Asch
• Oliver's Milkshake by Vivian French
• Tea With Milk  by Allen Say
• Milk Goes to School  by Terry Border

and a chapter book

• Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman


and some nonfiction books worth looking for
• Journey of a Glass of Milk by John Malam
• From Milk to Ice-Cream  by Bridget Heos
• Eat Smart Dairy by Vic Parker
• Dairy  by Honor Head
• From Farm to Table: Dairy by Woody Brambles 


Lots of fun 'cheese' picture books:
• The Great Cheese Robbery by Tim Warnes
•  The World-Famous Cheese Shop Break-In by Sean Taylor and Hannah Shaw
• I Don't Like Cheese  by Hannah Chandler
• Dinosaurs Love Cheese  by Jackie French
• Mack and the Missing Cheese  by Chae Strathie
• Cheese Belongs to You by Alexis Deacon



My favourite cow stories:
• Belinda by Pamela Allen
• Kiss the Cow by Phyllis Root
• Myron's Magic Cow  by Marlene Newman
• Cow by  Malachy Doyle
• Prudence the Part -Time Cow by Jody Jensen Shaffer
• The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky 


And if Tony  a poem by Ed Galing and Erin Stead is in your library borrow it too. In this story the narrator reminisces about how, when he was a boy , he would go out early each morning and greet Tony, the horse that pulled the milk cart. While on the topic of milk deliveries, I was always fascinated by the 'milk float' that delivers milk in London in the Shirley Hughes' Alfie stories.

11th January National Milk Day

It is National Milk Day in the US today. It is World Milk Day on he 1st June, it is World School Milk Day in the UK on 25th September and it is Chocolate Milk Day on 27th September. No matter which day you celebrate milk on, there are three different opportunities to do so. I have time to write now so I can prepare a list of books for a display in June when my students will be at school.

I dislike milk intensely and I'm sure it is because we were made to drink milk that had sat in the hot sun curdling, from when it was delivered until we drank it at morning tea time around 11 am. Milk was delivered free of charge to school children in NSW in an endeavour to make sure we all had a daily dose of goodness and calcium. There was no such thing then as flavoured milk and we weren't allowed to put Milo in it.

School children today have a much bigger choice when choosing a milk drink and it is not compulsory to drink it at school. Some of the five year olds I taught last year are such city children that they had no idea where milk even came from other than 'out of the carton'. That was quickly remedied by books, a film  and a visit to a farm where they each had a turn at trying to milk a cow. There were some hilarious photos of these attempts.

It is important for children to know about where there food comes from and to recognise milk as a global food. There is a large variety of non fiction books that do milk and dairy foods very well. Look for:
• Milk from Cow to Carton  by Aliki
• From Grass to Milk by Stacy Taus-Bolstad
• Journey of a Glass of Milk by John Malam
• • From Milk to Icecream  by Bridget Heos

There are fewer stories about milk but these are good ones to look for and they cover a range of ages, include humour and address empathy and point of view well:

• Milk and Cookies by Frank Asch
• Don't Spill the Milk by Stephen Davies and Christopher Carr
• Milk Goes to School by Terry Border
• Fortunately, the Milk  by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
• Chocolate Milk, Por Favor by Maria Dismondy and Donna Farrell

31st August Book Week 2017

When the Picture Book of the Year shortlist came out I read the books and wondered what I was going to do with my Year 2 classes this year as I thought many of the list would need too much scaffolding to share with them successfully. I read The Patchwork Bike and could see a myriad of possibilities and it reminded me of of many other bicycle books that I had read that were also set in Africa. I then thought about the theme Escape to Everywhere  and thought about whether we could 'escape on a bicycle in Africa'. Mind mapping all these books and possibilities I put together a six week (one lesson a week) study which looked at the role of bicycles in Africa and how it differs from here. We started with looking at the role of bicycles in their own lives, where they come from, what they are used for, how much they cost, how many did each family have and who actually had one and could ride one. We recorded this anecdotally. Then we read these books, located the places on a map and talked at length about the main characters, the places and the bikes in the stories:

• Emmanuel's Dream which is a biography about Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, a disabled boy who grew up in West Ghana, overcame great difficulties and went on to inspire others. (See Emmanuel talking about his life here.)

• My Rows and Piles of Coins is the story of a Saruni who helps his mother carry everything to market in Tanzania each week and realises that a bicycle would change his and his mothers life for the better so he saves his money in order to buy one. He has a lot of coins but learns that it is still nowhere near enough to buy a bike.

• The Red Bicycle has a bicycle as the main character.It starts life in  i in North America, being owned and ridden by a young boy.  His bicycle is donated  to an organisation that ships bicycles to Africa and is sent to Burkina Faso, in West Africa, where it finds a home with Alisetta, who uses it to gain quicker access to her family's sorghum field and to the market and then is repurposes as an ambulance.(If you have All Aboard For the Bobo Road, it is also set in Burkina Faso and shows the role of bikes well in the illustrations.)

• In A Cloud of Dust tells the story of Anna who has a long walk to and  from school in Tanzania until the school is visited by a bicycle library. At this point I asked the children whether there was any aspect of Emmanuel, Saruni, Alisetta or Anna's life that they thought they would enjoy or like to try. The discussion was amazing. Many students thought these children had a degree of freedom and independence that they did not, some wanted to try working for money and some of the girls commented on liking to live 'without technology'.

Then we read The Patchwork Bike and watched both Maxine Beneba Clark read it on Youtube and it read on Story Box Library where we could see the illustrations in great detail because of their size on the smartboard. The students were fascinated by the way the illustrations were done on cardboard from a box. We talked about what we could use to make a bike. The students designed and drew up plans. I had time to read one class Galimoto too and this class made bikes from cardboard and wire. I was impressed with their  perseverance and their readiness to help each other.

Overall the Year 2 students and I have had a very interesting time in library lessons this term. We have used maps, turned the library into a makerspace to design and make, read good literature, put ourselves in others' shoes, watched film clips and been surprised at just what is happening charity and bike-wise.