Happy New Year

Happy New Year ... no birthday just food for thought. As always I am looking for ways to use literature with children to increase their empathy and I need to get at the boys young before they stop reading any fiction because I believe that it is reading fiction that develops empathic readers. Therefore I really savoured Elizabeth Farrelly's article in the Sydney Morning Herald and began to think about what I could do differently this year in classes to make a bigger impact. There goes my thinking time for the next three weeks!

I thought I'd share two books though today that will make you smile and which offer a myriad of avenues for getting very young children to look closely at feelings, theirs and others'. Both are by European authors and illustrators but available in English. Both appear simple because of their minimal text but they are deceptive and thus somewhat ageless.

Happy  by Mies Van Hout. Have you ever seen so much expression on a fish? This Dutch author's website is available in English and she has ideas for what to do with her book. One of the teachers at my school has used it very successfully for art  and in circle time. My staff had great fun sharing and comparing the French and English version of this book and deciding whether the translation was precise. We now need the original Dutch version and a Dutch speaker to translate so we can discuss it some more.

 In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek and Christine Roussey.   This cover illustration doesn't do this book justice. It has beautiful die-cut pages which show the heart decreasing in size. I haven't seen the original French version of this book.



Happy birthday Olivier Dunrea. His series about Gossie  is ideal for preschoolers and talking about feelings too.

27th December Erin E. Stead (1982)

Erin Stead is an American illustrator who has now many well-known books to her credit, some that she has illustrated for her husband, author Philip Stead. Look for A Sick Day for Amos McGee which won the Caldecott Medal, Bear Has a Story to Tell and the two she has illustrated for Julie Fogliano, And Then It's Spring  and  If You Want to See a Whale. Erin and Philip have a website called Number Five Bus which has interviews between themselves and other well-known children's book people.

24th December Christmas Truce

Given the events of late in Sydney, the fact that I am on school holidays and my family are home for Christmas I have spent time recently thinking about what parents have told their young children about
the grim events in the news. At school I try to share tough events through literature that we can discuss at their level. I want them to experience discomfit but within a safe, scaffolded situation that they experience vicariously and where they get to empathise but also to ask questions. This helps then when an unpleasant event or experience is closer to home because they have some schema to fall back upon.

Then this morning I was thinking about Christmas stories and browsing through my Christmas picture book pinterest list,  I saw In Flanders Fields and thought of how a positive experience occurs amongst the grimness of World War 1 in the name of Christmas. A truce is called to the fighting, the singing of carols unites the warring troops and a time of reflection ensues. Similarly there has been an outpouring of goodwill among the people in Sydney and the flowers in Martin Place have allowed a time of reflection and the chance to think about what really matters to each of us.

In the year to come as we mark the 100th anniversary of the start of WW1 it is nice to know that for at least a short time, it really was all quiet on the Western Front. I have read this story to my Year 2 children at Christmas and this year I also read them The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree on Remembrance Day because of its reference to this day. The students asked lots of questions, queried why it had taken Ruthie's father so long to come home after the armistice and made connections between this and other books we had read. This is the power of good children's books.

Now there are quite a few titles about the truce and all have good points, but the Jorgensen one works for me because the children relate to the hurt robin and his need of rescue, the black and white illustrations have a subtlety that removes the graphic horror of war and it is just the right length to read in one sitting, but by all means check out the others so you can match your students with the 'right' book.

• In Flanders Fields by Norman Jorgensen
• Shooting at the Stars  by John Hendrix
• Christmas Truce by Aaron Shepard
• War Game by Michael Foreman
• Truce: The Day the Soldiers Stopped Fighting by Jim Murphy
• Christmas in the Trenches by John McCutcheon 
• The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy
• The Christmas Truce: the Place Where Peace was Found by Hilary Robinson

17th December Raul Colon (1952)

Recently I purchased this wonderful new wordless picture book called Draw! It was illustrated by Raul Colon. I wondered why I had never seen any other books by this illustrator. I looked on the library catalogue and found that we did in fact, already have five other books by him. I was surprised because to me Draw! stood out as being 'new', very refreshing and very different. Of course the other titles were beautifully illustrated and well worth a look, but this one is his alone and I think this book is outstanding.

Researching further I found out that today is his birthday and that I hadn't written about him on the blog before. Here you can learn more about him and his 'scratchy' art. Here is an interview with Raul where he explains the backstory for creating Draw! It could be used with a class. His biographies are wonderful, but his life sounds like it would make a good biography too!

5th December Day of the Ninja

While Day of the Ninja may have started and evolved to be about dressing and behaving as ninjas, it is now a day that is easily celebrated with young children through picture books. Ninjas are certainly 'in vogue' as a topic for them and an abundance of new titles have been published in the last few years. See some of them here on Pinterest. Corey Rosen Schwartz and Dan Santat have created two books that are very popular in my library - Ninja Red Riding Hood and The Three Ninja Pigs.