5th November Tsunami Awareness Day

Quality children's picture books — richly illustrated and often poetically written — can introduce young readers to people, places, and times they might not otherwise experience. 

It's important not to scare children when talking about something powerful and real like a tsunami. Adults need to take care to assure children about how rare these events are and how safe they are where they are living.

Children's books are both a timely and timeless resource because of the way they encourage kids to make a connection to the people and places portrayed. They build upon the news and facts by providing a context for understanding who was affected and what was lost. With the guidance of a parent or teacher, picture books and serialised novels can be used to develop understanding and empathy and perhaps the will to help.

I teach an enrichment group of Year 2 students and often I serialise Pearl Buck's The Big Wave, look at life in Japan through picture books and together with the students research tsunamis. They know what tsunamis are because of the media and they are very aware of natural disasters as they live in a country that has been devastated by bushfires and floods. When I was their age I knew nothing about tsunamis and very little about Japan, but I was a keen reader and I know that I would have loved this unit of work. It would have satisfied my need to read, know more and travel elsewhere. I did know Hokusai's Big Wave painting because my parents had a print of it and it fascinated me. There are so many wonderful picture books that feature it now. See:

• The Great Wave  by Veronique Massenot 

• One Day in Japan with Hokusai by Julia Altman

• Hokusai by Deborah Kogan Ray         

You could choose however to just look at tsunamis and there are enough books for students this age to search out and read. Look for:

• Tsunami! by Kimono Kajikawa and Ed Young

• Kenta and the Big Wave by Ruth Ch

• The Tsunami Quilt by Tammy Yee and Antony Fredericks

These next three books tell the true story of a baby hippo who was orphaned during the Indian Ocean tsunami in 

• Mama: A True Story, in Which a Baby Hippo Loses His Mama During a Tsunami, but Finds a New Home and a New Mama   by Jeanette Winter

•  A Mama for Owen by Marion Dane Bauer and John Butler

• Owen and Mzee: True Story of a Remarkable Friendship by Isabella and Craig Hatkoff

• Wisdom: The Midway Albatross by Darcy Pattison and Kitty Harvill

• Elephant Mountain  by Janeen Brian and Sally Rippin

• Bibile: the True Story of a Baby Orphan Elephant  by Teresa Cannon and Liz Wilks

• Elephant Alert by Jackie French

• Running Wild  by Michael Morpurgo

• High Tide in Hawaii by Mary Pope Osborne

There are these nonfiction texts in the library, but there are many others, many which are more recent:

• Sweeping Tsunamis by Louise and Richard Spilsbury

• Ocean Tides and Tsunamis by Baby Professor 

• Can Surfers Surf on Tsunamis? by Baby Professor

• Understanding Earthquakes and Tsunamis by Olivia Williams

• Tsunamis and Other Natural Disasters by Mary Pope Osborne

• The Tsunami Book by Gillian Jolly

• Earthquakes and Tsunamis by Emily Bone

• The Science of Natural Disasters: The Devastating Truth about Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis by Alex Woolf and Andy Rowland

19th April Banana Day

Banana Day is held annually on the third Wednesday of April.  

There are so many books you could use to celebrate Banana Day. These are only the ones in my library with the words banana or bananas in the title. There are many more where they are in the illustrations. 

Most of the books feature bananas as fruit, but a few look at 'going bananas' an idiom which means acting irrationally or crazy, something completely different and unrelated to the fruit. Where did this idiom come from? 

Young audiences will laugh at Piranhas Don't Eat Bananas, love the riddles in What Do You Call a Gorilla with a Banana in Each Ear? , be able to learn where bananas come from in  Juliana's Bananas and  thoroughly enjoy the poems in Michael Rosen's anthology of poems Bananas in My Ears. 

17th April Haiku Poetry Day

Haiku is a form of poetry that originated in Japan and for hundreds of years, school children in Japan have been introduced to poetry through the work of Issa. He was born in central Japan in 1763 and began writing poetry as a young child. Issa had a deep love for the natural world and it is the natural world that is the subject of not only his poems, but most traditional haiku. The book Cool Melons is a classic introduction to Issa's poems and an inspirational book about haiku, nature and life.

Traditionally haiku consist of 17 on ("syllables"), in three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively. They take nature as their subject and include  the juxtaposition of two images or ideas.Today's haiku play with the format, but usually stick to the three lines and about 17 syllables. See this lesson on youtube.

The teachers at my school make good use of the books of haiku that I have in the library, so I am happy to add new ones if I know they will be used. We have these.There is something for everyone here and quite a range. Betsy Snyder writes haiku for the very young, even for board books. There is a couple of 'how to' books, anthologies of poems and stories told in haiku.

 If you are looking for  beautiful books that use haiku as an integral part of their storytelling technique, read  Hi, Koo! by Jon J. Muth and Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein and Ed Young. Whether  studying haiku or just just sharing a good book these two are worth the effort.

7th June Butterfly Day

In the UK today is designated Butterfly Education and Awareness Day, a day to make people aware of the role of butterflies in pollination and what they can do to ensure there are butterfly habitats close to them. Butterflies are certainly fascinating creatures because of their beauty and delicacy.

Many children's books focus on butterflies, but the ones here, I have included because of their illustrations and/or stories rather than their factual information. They will certainly cover a wide range of uses.

1. Butterfly by Petr Horacek.
2. A Butterfly is Patient  by Dianna Hutts Acton and Sylvia Long.
3. Caterpillar Butterfly by Vivian French and Charlotte Voake.
4.  Caterpillar and Butterfly by Ambelin Kwaymullina.
5.  Ten Little Caterpillars by Bill Martin Jnr and Lois Ehlert.
6.  I Wish I Were a Butterfly by James Howe and Ed Young.
7. Velma Gratch and the Way Cool Butterfly by Alan Madison and Kevin Hawkes.
8.  Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle and Julie Paschkis

For more butterfly titles including expository texts see Pinterest here.

3rd November National Non-fiction Day

It is National Non-Fiction Day in Britain. This is not a day we celebrate in Australia, but perhaps we should. As more and more information is being sought via the internet and online sources, teachers and librarians are spending less time using non-fiction books for research purposes.

I still use books to teach my under eights the parts of a good-for- research non-fiction book. The Usborne Beginners series of books is perfect for teaching  Year 1 about headings, contents, glossaries and indexes. I have enough of these for each child to have their own book to look at. The photographs are good, the contents page well set out, there are fact boxes, labels, large font and just the right amount of information for them to read. Pebble Plus is another series of non-fiction books that you could also use to do the same sort of activities with young students.

In the library we always have Non-fiction Monday. This means that if you come to the library for your take-home readers, that on Monday you must take a non-fiction text. Some of the most popular 'readers' are the National Geographic titles and any of those  authored by Seymour Simon.

The other thing that has happened to non-fiction books is that many of them have become 'works of art' and just like fiction picture books they are hard to resist. Illustrators like Steve Jenkins and Ed Young have shown readers that illustrations can certainly enhance the factual text.

18th July Ai-Ling Louie (1949)

Today I put out a display of all the versions of Cinderella that I could find. I started with Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story From China and then collected all the others including fiction such as Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters and Cinder Edna. I was doing this display to go with our Book Week theme, 'One World Many Stories'. Then when I came home I saw that it was the birthday of the author of Yeh-Shen, Ai-Ling Louie. What a coincidence? It is hard to believe that this book is 25 years old either. It is an especially good starting point for looking at other versions of well-known European fairytales, as it is based on ancient Chinese manuscripts that were written a thousand years before the first European version. For a good review of the book see Papertigers. I'll take a photo of the books tomorrow, but meanwhile here are some of the books in the display.

28th November Tomi Ungerer (1931) Ed Young (1931) David Wyatt (1968)

Today is the birthday of three amazing illustrators! Each has a very distinct style and each has many memorable illustrations worth perusing.

Tomi Ungerer, the French illustrator was born Jean-Thomas Ungerer in Strasbourg. He has had a colourful career, moving a number of times, changing work focus often and being an inveterate collector. He moved to the USA in 1956 and had his first children's book published very soon after. As well as children's books he published many adult books. Many readers say that his books are 'unusual' which is probably a polite way of saying they don't like them, but I do. I particularly like The Beast of Monsieur Racine, Crictor and his twisted fairytales. I remember reading his version of Red Riding Hood to a year five and we were talking about the ending where she ate the wolf for weeks to come. Ungerer won the Hans Christian Anderson Award in 1998 and in 2007 Strasbourg honoured him by opening the Tomi Ungerer Museum.

Ed Young is an American illustrator who was born in China, living in Shanghai and Hong Kong before moving to the USA to study architecture. While there he turned instead to art and illustration. He has illustrated a multitude of books, mainly for other authors. He won the Caldecott Medal for Lon Po Po: A Red Riding Hood Story From China and has been nominated for the Hans Christian Anderson Award twice. Ed's illustrations often include collage and often they appear dark, but they are very dramatic and add a dimension to the author's text that certainly enhance the words and make the book long lasting. His best books often have an Asian origin and he is able to bring the story alive authentically. This is obvious in Tsunami; Wabi Sabi; Beyond the Great Mountains; Monkey King and Cat and Rat. Ed Young would make my list of top ten illustrators!

David Wyatt is an English illustrator, best known for his illustrations of fantasy for authors such as Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Dianne Wynne Jones. Look at his website to see just how detailed and beautiful his illustrations are. In my library there is very little of his work except in Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet which is a beautifully illustrated 'gift' book.

29th May Tenzing Norgay (1914 - 1986)

Tenzing Norgay was born late in May in 1914 but after his ascent of Mount Everest with Edmund Hilary on 29th May, 1953 he decided to celebrate his birthday on the 29th. So today is the anniversary of the first successful ascent on Everest. Norgay was the sherpa who accompanied New Zealander Hilary to the summit and subsequently became famous in his own right.

In the library there is a beautiful picture book biography of Tenzing called Tiger of the Snows by Robert Burleigh. It is written in poetry and tells of the climb and Tenzing's childhood in a very laudatory manner. It is accompanied by blue and purple pastel illustrations which are done on black backgrounds. These atmospheric illustrations by Ed Young capture the grandeur of the mountains and the wonder of what the men achieved. If you do not have this book in your library perhaps you have I Wish I'd Stood on Everest by Leonie Young. This picture book is part of the Been There Done That series where Leonie Young writes about famous people and how they achieved their dreams.