21st April Tea Day

”You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
~ C.S. Lewis

There is nothing nicer than a good read and a cup of tea. So celebrating Tea Day is a must. Tea is not something children give a lot of thought to, because very few of them actually drink tea, but so many children's picture books feature tea. At the very minimum they finish with and 'they all had tea'...it is a warm, secure, happy, family feeling to finish with. Think of The Elephant and the Bad Baby at the end where everyone goes back to the baby's home and his mother gives them tea and pancakes. Think of Alfie Gets in First and how after the problem of the locked door is finally solved everybody sits down for a cup of tea. Yes, these books are old but the pattern continues and now there are even stories with tea in the title.

Many years ago when I started teaching I did a lengthy integrated social science unit called 'What's in a cup of tea?' and my Year 5 class and I explored the tea industry, the sugar industry and the milk industry for a whole term. What fun it was and given my knowledge now of children's literature I would have had plenty of good books to add to it. What a shame the current curriculum doesn't allow for such tangents or flights of fancy anymore.

Below are covers of books in our library that feature tea parties, cups of tea or the importance of tea. The Biography of Tea pictured above gives a comprehensive history of tea and its role in many cultures.

11th November Origami Day

Origami Day was first observed in Japan. It honours the ancient art of creating objects from square pieces of paper.

The origami crane is one of the most recognized origami models around the world.

©bigstockphoto.com/Remains

Origami, which comes from the Japanese words, ori meaning folding, and kami meaning paper, originated in Japan in the 6 century, though for a long period of time the art was preserved for religious ceremonies. By the 17th century, origami had become mainstream in Japanese society and was being used for decorative and ceremonial purposes.

Amazing objects have been made that are indeed works of art, but at school we will be celebrating by making much simpler animals and having the children who are adept at origami teach their peers. When they have made a recognisable animal there is such a sense of achievement. 

We have a large number of books in the craft section of the library which give students ideas about what is possible, but we also have books where origami is central to the story or poetry in the book. Of course we have Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes  in picture book format but there are other picture books as well. See these:

• Newspaper Boy and Origami Girl  and The Little Bookshop and the Origami Army by Michael Foreman

• Origami Heart by Binny

• The Origami Master  by  Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

• Wild Weather  by Thomas Kingsley Troupe (this is one book in a series called Origami Science Adventures)

• Fold Me a Poem by Kristine O'Connell George and Lauren Stringer

• The Paper Crane by Molly Bang
• Yoko's Paper Cranes by Rosemary Wells 
• Little Oh by Laura Krauss Melmed
• Tree of Cranes by Allen Say (just perfect for the run-up to Christmas)
• Peace Crane by Sheila Hamanaka
• More-igami by Dori Kieber
• Butterflies for Kiri by Cathryn Falwell
• Float  by Daniel Miyares
• The Fog by Kyo Maclear and Kennard Pak
• Mole and the Newspaper by Laurence Bourguignon

and

• Origami, Poems and Pictures  by The British Museum would make a wonderful present as it comes with the paper and it becomes a family reading, viewing and doing activity.

28th August Roger Duvoisin (1904 - 1980) Tasha Tudor (1915 - 2008) Phyllis Krasilovsky (1926) Allen Say (1937) Kevin Hawkes (1959)

Five birthdays...too many to contemplate especially as the last two really deserve to have an entry to themselves. Following will be only a little on each.

Swiss-born American Roger Duvoisin is best known for his humorous book about Petunia, a goose who carries round a book in the hope that she will become wise.

American illustrator Tasha Tudor has more than ninety books, none of which have become well-known in Australia. An American ex-pat mother introduced her books to me about ten years ago. She was concerned that we had no halloween titles in the school library, despite the number of American families at the school, so she donated some to us. Among them was Halloween Moonshine which clearly shows Tasha Tudor's love of gardens, nature and the joy of home and small things.

I cannot find out much about Phyllis Krasilovsky. I wondered if she is Dutch, given the Dutch content in some of her books. My favourite of her books is the Peter Spier illustrated The Cow Who Fell in the Canal. Kindergarten have revisited it this week as part of a unit of work on Van Gogh's bridges for the Book Week Expo.

Allen Say was born in Japan to a Korean father and a Japanese-American mother. He moved to America when he was sixteen and came to the notice of the children's literature fraternity when he won the Caldecott Medal for Grandfather's Journey, a partly autobiographical picture book about his grandfather's journey from Japan to America. Many of his illustrations have a photographic quality complete with white borders. His books demand discussion and rereadings.

American illustrator, Kevin Hawkes, is so versatile. Every one of his books stands alone. You don't pick his books up and immediately say, 'oh that is a Kevin Hawkes' book'. Three of my favourite books, Weslandia written by Paul Fleischman; Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen; and The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky are all illustrated by Kevin Hawkes and in very different styles of illustration. He can be serious or he can show his dry sense of humour. How did he come up with so many animal bottoms for Michael Ian Black's Chicken Cheeks?