1st January 2021

2021 a new year! I want to be positive despite being in lock down, so I thought about books that I found helpful, hopeful or inspiring that I have shared with teachers in the last few months of school. Here's a few...

1. Rain Before Rainbows by Smriti Halls and David Litchfield

'Rain before rainbows. Clouds before sun. Night before daybreak. A new day’s begun.'

This book and these words feature on a television ad here in Australia at the moment, and each time it is on I think of the joy I had sharing this very hopeful book with Kindergarten and the discussion of rainbows that occurred after it. 

Great poetic words and then there is the  bonus of illustrations by David Litchfield.

2. Hope the Rainbow Fairy  by Rosie Greening and Lara Eade 

While this isn't great literature, for my under 8 year old library audience the fairy genre is popular and it does have a very positive message about staying well and safe.

3. And the People Stayed Home by Kitty O'Meara, Stefano Di Cristofaro and Paul Pereda

This book started as a poem written in March 2020 by Kitty O' Meara, a retired teacher. It went viral on the internet and has now been illustrated.

'O’Meara’s thoughtful poem about the pandemic, quarantine, and the future suggests there is meaning to be found in our shared experience of the coronavirus and conveys an optimistic message about the possibility of profound healing for people and the planet. Her words encourage us to look within, listen deeply and connect with ourselves and the earth in order to heal.'

4. Windows by Patrick Guest and Jonathan Bentley

'Windows shows how five kids from different parts of the world connect and draw strength from their communities from behind the safety of their own windows. 

Heartwarming, hopeful and surprisingly funny, Windows will resonate with families all over the world and become a valuable time capsule of what life was like in 2020.'

5. What We'll Build  by Oliver Jeffers

'What shall we build, you and I? 

I'll build your future and you'll build mine.
We'll build a watch to keep our time.'

A father and daughter lay the foundations for their safe and secure life together, something all children want to know they will have.

I'm sure there are other books I could add to this list, but I work with a young audience where I want the message to be positive, hopeful and uplifting. They may not be books to start a new year with a new class, but given 2020, we never know when we might need to pull them off the shelves again.

23rd October Book Week

Another Book Week over! Every year I say do I have to do Book Week next year? It always seems like so much work and often so unrelated to books. This year's Book Week seems to have gone on forever because it was postponed from Term 3 to Term 4 in the hope that Covid would be over and we could once again have visitors in the school. We were lucky we did have an author visit 'in the flesh', not on Zoom and it was a huge success. Kate and Jol Temple came to talk to grades K to 2. They were hugely entertaining as well as informative and the children were certainly inspired. One Year 1 student told me it was the 'highlight of 2020'! We have ibis in our school playground, so the children were fascinated by  Bin Chicken  and I am in awe of Room on Our Rock and the way it gives two points of view, simply by reading the book backwards.

We did have a Book Week Parade and the students did a marvellous job of kitting themselves out, many without spending money, but instead using ingenuity and creativity. I suggested they come as a 'curious creature' or a 'wild mind' instead of a book character and many did do this. There was a myriad of Ada Lovelaces, Jane Goodalls, Albert Einsteins, David Attenboroughs, inspired by the Little People Big Dreams series of books, Bindi and Robert Irwins, from their series of books, Saucepan Men and Silky from The Faraway Tree.

The teachers got into the spirit too. I dressed as Ann Carroll Moore, the first librarian to advocate for children's libraries. I had shared the book  Miss Moore Thought Otherwise by Jan Pinborough with some of my classes and it seemed ideal. She certainly had a 'wild mind', as we now have many children's libraries including the most fantastic one that I work in which caters for 3 to 8 year olds, and as many of my students think 'has a book on everything'!

Every year I look at the Book Week theme and think how am I going to do that with such young children, but as the year rolls on and I think about it some more I manage something and this year was no exception. I have had great fun especially with curious creatures. When I was told next year's theme,  Old Worlds, New Worlds, Other Worlds I immediately thought...oh it is so long and so all encompassing, but no doubt as I mull it over and talk to friends, ideas will flow. On to next year. An author or illustrator needed...get thinking!

26th September International Rabbit Day

International Rabbit Day is celebrated on the  fourth Saturday of September each year. This day promotes the protection and welfare of both domestic and wild rabbits. Rabbits are considered pests in Australia as they have done so much damage to indigenous fauna's habitats, but it is nice to see that they do have a day of their own that has nothing to do with Easter. There are some wonderful books worth sharing too because books like these do not have a rush on borrowing at Easter. Where the rabbit in a story is not a toy, it is often adventurous just like Peter Rabbit in Beatrix Potter's classic.

See 

• The Wonderful Habits of Rabbits  by Douglas Florian and Sonia Sanchez. This is one long poem that begins

 ' The habits of rabbits are many, not few,

 with plenty of things that they love to do!'

• The Rabbit Problem  by Emily Gravett. This beautiful book follows a pair of rabbits through the year as they cope with their ever expanding brood. It is also a good introduction to Fibonacci and his number sequence!

• All Because of Jackson by Dick King Smith. Jackson, a rabbit wants to see the world so he stows away on a ship hoping to have adventures. This is just the way rabbits came to be in Australia!

• Tom Crean's Rabbit  by  Meredith Hooper and Bert Kitchen.  This is a true story about a rabbit that went to Antarctica with the Scott expedition!

• The Great Rabbit Chase by Freya Blackwood. This is the story of a mother and daughter who chase their escaped rabbit through the streets of town. Mum is wrapped in towel! Kindergarten love this story.

• One Runaway Rabbit  by David Metzenthen and Mairead Murphy. This too is a chase, but this time a fox is chasing the rabbit.

• The Black Rabbit by Philippa Leathers. This time a rabbit is trying to escape from the 'big black rabbit'. Children love to be in 'on the secret' when you read books like this where the big black rabbit is in fact a shadow.

20th September Barbara Ker Wilson (1929 -2020)

I seem to have had reason to dip into the death notices in the paper lately and am always saddened when I read about someone I know of. A couple of weeks ago I read of the passing of Barbara Ker Wilson who was quite a prominent person in the children's book world here in Australia. She not only wrote her own books but was instrumental in publishing others. I first met Barbara's writing when I read her book The Willow Pattern Story. I have long collected blue and white plates and am fascinated by the Chinese love story about a  Mandarin girl who defies her rich father and elopes with the poor boy who she loves. I have a copy of this book ready to share with any grandchildren interested enough to know why there are so many versions of willow pattern plates in my house.

I decided to reread many of her books that we have in our library. She certainly had a broad range:

• Wishbones a Chinese Cinderella beautifully illustrated by Meilo So.

• The Turtle and the Island a folktale that tells the story of how a sea turtle builds the island of New Guinea with illustrations by Frane Lessac.

• Maui and the Big Fish  is a Polynesian creation myth with illustrations by Frane Lessac.

• Acacia Terrace tells the story of one family who lives in this house in Sydney from the 1860s to after World War II. This book is used often because it fits in with the current History syllabus.

• The Day of the Elephant illustrated by Frane Leassac was written in response to the Asian tsunami which devastated Indonesia, India and Thailand.

And the fun birthday story Meltdown illustrated by David Cox which tells what happens when an ice-cream cake melts on a very hot day.

22nd September World Rhinoceros Day

I have written about rhinos before here, but I wanted to add some books to any celebration of Rhinoceros Day that you may have. I have been looking at 'true' animal stories while exploring the Book Week theme, Curious Creatures Wild Minds, with one of my classes. We looked at Rhino in the House: the True Story of Saving Samia and  Anna and Samia: the True Story of Saving a Black Rhino. Both of these books tell the story of Anna Merz, a wildlife conservationist and a baby black rhino that she rescues and plans to rehabilitate, ready to send back into the wild. She nurtures the calf, names it Samia, feeds it special formula, and even lets it sleep in her bed. The children were fascinated by what Anna did.          

We then looked at My Travels With Clara, a book that follows the travels of a Dutch sea-captain and a black rhino from India to Venice with many adventures along the way. This story is reminiscent of the story of Zeraffa Giraffa, where a giraffe  travels from Africa to Paris.

Then last Thursday I covered and catalogued a new book called Rhinocorn Rules!  by Matt Carr and was pleasantly surprised to see that this book delivered far more than I thought it would. My readers like Matt Carr books, zany animal books, iridescent colours and unicorns so I picked it up in the book shop. On reading it, I found that the last two pages offered amazing facts about rhinos succinctly but very pertinently, perfect for Endangered Species Day.

See these and other rhino titles here on
my Pinterest page.

6th September Happy Father's Day

Even without mothers in the library to borrow Fathers' Day books, the books about fathers did leave the library this year, especially with the preschoolers and Kindergarten classes. This makes me happy because many of these books only leave the library once or twice a year. Father's Day is a pretty much a non-event in my house as the children are absent, but I do remember some good celebrations and some favourite books.

These five are my favourites and timeless. Unfortunately all are out of print and need republishing! They do not need to be read on Father's Day! Happy searching and then reading!

• Not Like That, Like This! by Tony Bradman and Joanna Burroughes

I love the sense of silliness and fun in this book, the word patterns that young listeners and readers quickly predict, and the ending.

• A Dad Who Measures Up  by Davide Cali

I love the initiative the girl in this story has. She is looking for a dad who measures up to her single-parent mum. Together with her mum she makes a list of all the necessary attributes and puts an add in the paper.

• My Father's Shop by Satomi Ichakawa

I love the father son relationship here. Dad wants one thing and son is determined it won't happen. The solution to the standoff is very novel and amusing.

• Smart Dad by Amanda Graham 

I love this one because living with boaties it is so easy to see this situation arising. Dad builds a boat in the backyard not thinking about the logistics of he  getting it out of the backyard!

 • The Dad Library  by Dennis Whelehan

Such a good read aloud. Who hasn't thought about swapping dads even if only for a short time? 

19th September International Red Panda Day

Red pandas are not as popular as giant pandas in children's books, but they still manage to find their way into endearing stories and are worth celebrating on their special day, the third Saturday of  September annually.

Unlike the name and the diet of bamboo implies, red pandas are not related to giant pandas and were discovered fifty years earlier.

If you want a brief, but useful informative text about red pandas for young students and you do not have one in your school library this is a good start. And this on Kiddle. 

In our library we have:

• Red Pandas by Laura Marsh

• Red Pandas by Victoria Blakemore

Picture book stories that feature red pandas

• Pip and the Bamboo Path  by Jesse Hodgson

• Red Panda's Toffee Apples by Ruth Paul

• Hedgehog's Magic Tricks by Ruth Paul

• Rabbit's Hide-and-Seek by Ruth Paul

• Amy the Red Panda is Writing the Best Story in the World by Colleen Venable & Ruth Chan

Look out for Baby Red Pandas by Kate Riggs, one book in a new series for very young readers by a publisher who really knows how to do young nonfiction with spectacular photographs.

Curious Creatures Armadillos (Armadillo Day is the 13th August)

I have been contemplating talking to my students about armadillos because at the moment many of them think aardvarks and armadillos are interchangeable. This is not a major issue because we have neither of these animals in Australia and it is much more important that they know about animals such as echidnas, bandicoots and bilbies etc that live here, but as we are talking about 'curious creatures' and we have books that feature them I thought I would do a little bit of research.  Firstly I noticed that a new Jon Klassen book is about to hit the shelves next year and it has an armadillo in it. Here's the publisher's blurb for The Rock From the Sky

"Turtle really likes standing in his favorite spot. He likes it so much that he asks his friend Armadillo to come over and stand in it, too. But now that Armadillo is standing in that spot, he has a bad feeling about it . . . 

Here comes The Rock from the Sky, a hilarious meditation on the workings of friendship, fate, shared futuristic visions, and that funny feeling you get that there’s something off somewhere, but you just can’t put your finger on it. Merging broad visual suspense with wry wit, celebrated picture book creator Jon Klassen gives us a wholly original comedy for the ages."

Now this armadillo does not look particularly like the ones we have in other books, so all the more reason I need to find a photograph. All the species of armadillos can be found in the Americas. This website gives some good photos and some interesting facts.

Here's the books the library has:

             

• Armadillos by Kate Riggs

• Ape and Armadillo Take Over the World by James Sturm

• The Armadillo fom Amarillo by Lynne Cherry

• Willow the Armadillo by Marilou Reeder and Dave Mottram

• Arnie the Accidental Hero  by Joanne Partis

• Milo Armadillo by Jan Fearnley

• Armadillo Ray  by John Beifuss and Peggy Turley

• An Armadillo in Paris by Julie Kraulis

• Accident! by Andrea Tsurumi

• The Wishing Stone by Steve Smallman and Rebecca Elliott

• The Beginning of the Armadillos by Shoo Rayner 

and two series for chapter book reading young readers

• Hare and Armadillo  by Jeremy Strong

• Adventure Duck vs the Armadillo Army by Steve Cole

Curious Creatures - the Aardvark and the Pangolin

While sharing Hello Hello  by Brian Wenzel with Year 1 classes we looked closely at the

animals on the endpapers and tried to name the animals we saw. There was much discussion of the aardvark. Most students thought it was an armadillo or an anteater so when we got the back of the book where it tells you what the animals are and how endangered they are we discovered that it was in fact an aardvark. The pangolin on the cover caused quite a frenzied discussion as well, so this week we shared Tenrec's Twigs by Bert Kitchen, watched a short BBC Attenborough film clip  on Madagascan animals and  thus looked in more detail at pangolins. This book allows students to empathise with the tenrec as he tries to solve his dilemma.

I went looking in the library for books which would allow further exploration and managed to find:

Pangolins:

• What in the World is a Pangolin? by Edward R. Ricciuti 

• Pangolins  by Victoria Blakemore

• Roly Poly Pangolin by Anna Dewdney

• Pinkie Mouse, Where Are You? by Alison Green and Deborah Allwright

Aardvarks:

• Aardvarks by Maddie Gibbs

• Aardvark or Anteater?  by Tamra Orr

• Awkward Aardvark by Mwalimu and Adrienne Kennaway

• Aalfred and Aalbert by Morag Hood

• It's an Orange Aardvark by Michael Hall

• Can an  Aardvark Bark? by Melissa Stewart and Steve Jenkins

• The Aardvark Who Wasn't Sure  by Jill Tomlinson

And just for fun AA is For Aardvark by by Mark Schulman, Aardvarks Disembark by Ann Jonas and Oi Aardvark! by Kes Gray and Jim Field which is coming soon.

Curious Creatures

 

As part of the theme 'Curious Creatures, Wild Minds' one of the displays in the library this week focussed on 'long necks'. We displayed books with animals who have long necks such as giraffes, alpacas, llamas, camels, ostriches, emus, and flamingoes together with some quiz questions to get the students talking. 

Among the books was Jo Bertini's A Man and his Camel. This is a very old picture book first published in 1996, but I have never quite brought myself to the point of withdrawing it from stock. Why? Well it fits into many themes; journeys, searches, home, deserts, camels, Tibet, Silk Road and endangered species and you are never quite sure when you'll be asked for a book. I picked it up to read while one of my Year 2 classes were doing some independent silent reading. Beside the Bactrian camel (the camel with two humps) there were other animals unknown to my students such as the musk deer, red panda, desman, otter, large mouse-eared bat, great bustard, sand gazelle, fenec fox, Crespi pelican, ibex, markhor, woolly flying squirrel and a jerboa. Yes, a multitude of curious creatures!

The man travelled from Pakistan, across the Himalayan Mountains into Kashmir, through Tibet to China, on to Mongolia,  Russia and the Volga River, on to Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, then to Israel and Egypt. From Alexandria around the Red Sea and into Saudi Arabia before going through Iraq to Iran. Next Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Samarkand, over the Kashgar Crossing, across the Pamir Mountains, down the Kunnjerab Pass and back into Pakistan. What a journey? Older students could plot this journey on a map!

The choice of vocabulary is also worth noting. There are verbs such as:  gazed; puzzled; shrugged; console; caution; dally; muster; sighed; chimed; fringe; lowed; bid; chortled; and thumped. There are descriptions:

- a melancholy reindeer whose antlers hung in sorrow-filled folds 

- floating on her back, leaf-like in the waves

- who is threading a trail to...

- in a whorl of winds and rufous feathers

- a querulous creature and prone to hysteria

- there across a mirage of woollen pyramids

- camel herd had gathered in conference

So much to explore and I haven't mentioned the illustrations. Jo Bertini is an Australian artist but unfortunately I cannot find any other picture books by her. If your library hasn't discarded it, have a look. It is full of curious creatures and Jo Bertini has a wild mind!

Curious Creatures

The book The Curious Ar-Chew is the perfect book to share with a young class while you are exploring the Book Week theme, Curious Creatures Wild Minds. 

 "Three woodland friends (a hedgehog, a goose and a rabbit) puzzle over the identity of a very strange creature asleep in the hollow of a tree. It has orange rubbery feet like a goose, long ears like a rabbit  and a thick woolly coat like a lamb. "  

I read it to my four Kindergarten classes this week and  the story certainly captured their interest and kept them guessing as to what the creature was. When the answer is revealed on the last page there was a loud sigh of  'oh yeh', as they put the clues together. We had talked the previous week about just what 'curious' meant and many remembered that it had two meanings. The hedgehog, the goose and the rabbit were curious to know what the creature in the hollow was. They thought it was 'curious' because it was 'strange' to them. Once the children knew that the creature was a child they then wanted to talk about whether she was curious or not. We made a list of things she could be curious about. With older children you could also discuss who has the wild mind in this story and get them to support their reasoning with evidence from the book.

This book is the debut picture book for New Zealand author Sarah Grundy. It won the Storylines Joy Cowley Award in 2016 for Sarah and the illustrators, husband and wife team Ali Teo and by John O'Reilly. If you do not have this book in your library, but you have a subscription to Story Box Library, you will find it there.

Read and Wonder

Early in my days as the teacher librarian of students between 4 and 8 years old I discovered  a series of books from Walker Books called Read and Wonder.  No other books in the non-fiction section of the library were like these! They were not like the traditional non-fiction books with photographs, contents pages, an index, headings and subheadings. They looked like story books because they had illustrations. They were written and illustrated by well known authors and illustrators. There were books by Vivian French, Martin Jenkins, Nicola Davies, Dick King Smith, Charlotte Voake and Karen Wallace to name but a few. I could 'sell' them to boys because they were information books and I could 'sell' them to girls because they looked like storybooks.

At a conference I picked up a great poster that was thin but very wide and it had the covers of the books on it. It was the perfectly to display and 'sell' the books to the students and their parents when they came into the library to borrow books. The poster has long since worn thin and become tatty, but Walker has kept adding to this wonderful series of books. Along the way there has been a name change to Nature Storybooks  and they have included authors and illustrators from Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

This term while my library is 'drowning' in curious creatures and my students are exploring all sorts of animals that they want to know more about, these books have once again 'walked out of the library'. A student who had just read Nick Dowson's Tigress  came to chat with me about the book and wanted another book 'just like that!' I love it when my job is 'this easy'.

If you don't know just how many of these wonderful books there are I have put the one that are to do with animals on this Pinterest page. Illustrated here is an animal from each of the five vertebrate groups!

24th July Curious Creatures

I have had a lot of fun reading one of my favourite books to my K to 2 library classes this week. I know Book Week has been postponed until Term 4, but I was keen to get started on displays and exploring the theme 'Curious Creatures Wild Minds'. I wanted to start a discussion of this theme using the bunyip, an Australian mythical creature.

I asked the students to draw a creature. They all drew an animal that they could attach a label to. No one drew anything imaginary, extinct, or an amalgam of many animals. When I said, "Is a creature an animal?" The answer was a unanimous, "Yes." "So are you a creature?" Some hesitation, but finally a yes.

Then I asked the students to look at the picture above. "Is this a creature?" "Why do you say that?"
I asked them to make a mental list of three things they could see in the picture. I scribed the long list and there were some very interesting things on the lists, including a mobile phone, lipstick and a magnifying glass. Next, I asked them for one question they would like to ask this creature. There was the obvious like, "What are you?"; "What are you holding?"; "Who are you?" and  "Where do you live?" but there was also ones like, "Do you have friends?" ; "Why do you only have three toes?" and  "What is on your head?".

Lastly, I asked,  "Is this creature curious?" "What makes you say that?" This lead to a discussion of what the word 'curious' meant and after finding out that there are two meanings and that the second meaning is 'strange or unusual' there seemed to be consensus that it was a curious creature.

I then showed the students the cover of the book, The Bunyip of Berkley's Creek by Jenny Wagner and Ron Brooks, the book that won Picture Book of the Year in 1974, forty six years ago. They now knew what the character was, and many students then had anecdotes that they wished to share.

I read the story, slowly and quietly. The first page sets the mysterious tone beautifully. You could hear a pin drop while I read, so few children knew the book. I stopped only once to discuss and explain the sign which has the long words, 'Environment Preservation' and 'Trespassers Prosecuted'.

After reading, in pairs students discussed what they liked about the story and Year 2 pairs also devised a definition of a bunyip eg A bunyip is ... We listened to each others definitions and then amalgamated the pertinent bits to get something like this...
A bunyip is a large mythical creature which lurks (hangs around) in creeks, billabongs,              swamps and waterholes.

The Year 2 students had decided that bunyips weren't real, but wanted to know more, so we looked for other books in the library with bunyips and on Kiddle which they had used last term. We found these books:
1. What's a Bunyip?  by Nette Hilton and Roland Harvey. 
2. Bunyips Don't !  by Sally Odgers and Kim Gamble.
3. Emily and the Big Bad Bunyip by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley.

The students thought that Harvey, Gamble and Whatley had all seen Ron Brooks' bunyip, because they too had drawn the bunyip with a tail, floppy ears, a very rounded body and it didn't look overly scary.




If you choose to do this, do not show the students the Kiddle entry before you read the books, because it will give them a different view of bunyips from the one Jenny Wagner intended. It is for further exploration for the students who want to read up on Australian folklore or Aboriginal mythology.

Later I found three more books:
• Out of Nowhere by Tricia Oktober
• Rosie and the Bunyip  by Meredith Costain, and 
• The Butti Butti Bunyip by Dianne Bates

If there had been time we could have looked at and compared the four bunyip illustrations that appeared on Australian stamps in 1994, one of which was Ron Brooks' Berkley Creek one.


Well we ran out of time, but all the bunyip books were borrowed, some students went off to explore the Indigenous Book Bins and others took from all the unusual animal books that we had on display!

PS. Jenny Wagner seems to 'like' curious creatures! Her novel The Nimbin is also about an endearing curious creature. It is perfect for primary classes.