3rd July World Meerkat Day

World Meerkat Day started in Dubbo, Australia. It was an initiative of Karen Ellis, the meerkat keeper at Taronga Western Plains Zoo and it has now become a day to heighten awareness of meerkats at several world zoos. She felt that lots of animals had a day, but meerkats didn't and as they were her favourite animal she decided to instigate it.

Meerkats are mongooses famed for their upright posture. They often stand on their rear legs and gaze alertly over the southern African plains where they live. Mothers can even nurse their young while standing.

Meerkats  work together in numbers. A few will typically serve as lookouts, watching the skies for birds of prey, such as hawks and eagles, that can snatch them from the ground. A sharp, shrill call is the signal for all to take cover. While a few individuals guard the group, the rest busy themselves foraging for the foods that make up their varied diet. Meerkats will eat insects, lizards, birds, and fruit. When hunting small game, they work together and communicate with purring sounds. 

Beautiful pictures and easy reading format will help children fall in love with meerkats as they are a popular choice of characters for children's books.

Meet meerkats first then read about their antics!

• Meerkats  by Katie Woolley

• Meerkats  by James Maclaine

• Meerkats by Laura Marsh

• Meerkats  by Valerie Bodden

• Baby Meerkats by Ginjier L. Clarke

• Meet the Meerkat by Darrin Lunde 

• Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett

• Meerkat Splash by Aura Parker

• Little Meerkat by Aleesah Darlison

• Meerkat Choir  by Nicki Greenberg

• Milly the Meerkat by Oakley Graham

• Legs: The Tale of a Meerkat Lost and Found by Sarah Dodds 

• That Naughty Meerkat! by Ian Whybrow & Garry Parsons

• My Meerkat Mum  by Ruth Paul

and a few short chapter books

• Meerkat Madness  four titles in series by Ian Whybrow

• The Mystery of Meerkat Hill one of the titles in the series by Alexander McCall Smith about the eight year old Precious Ramotswe.

• Ninja Meerkats  ten book series by Gareth P. Jones.

5th June Hot Air Balloon Day

Did you know that the hot air balloon is the oldest form of flight technology used for carrying humans? The first manned flight occurred in 1783. The balloon itself consists of an envelope, which is used to contain the hot air, and a gondola, where passengers and a means of creating hot air are typically housed. 

Recently a popular television program started its new season with a harrowing scene which involved a hot air balloon. My husband and son think this show is very humorous, but often I find myself squirming. A book I really enjoyed, Enduring Love began with an awkward hot air balloon incident too. It was made into a movie and I had to cover my eyes at the beginning of it while the hot air balloon scene was playing. You guessed it, there is absolutely no way I would ever get in a hot air balloon. I do think they look good sailing across the sky. They are beautifully bright and demand your attention, but my attention is from the ground with my feet touching the dirt.

Today I collected up some books to put together a display. We had a Donut Day display out for the 2nd of June, but it had been decimated so I had to find something to replace it. Obviously donuts are popular. I could have had several copies of the Mr Panda books. I have a Mr Panda toy and together with the books he is popular. 

Hot air balloons has proved an ideal replacement ...there are plenty of books across a wide reading range. Some special books worth mentioning are:

Picture books:
• The Great Balloon Hullaballoo by Peter Bently
• Flight of the Dodo by Peter Brown
• Miranda the Explorer by James Mayhew
• The Cloudspotter by Tom McLaughlin
• Hot Air: the Mostly True Story of the First Hot-air Balloon Ride by Marjorie Priceman
• Hot Air by Sandrine Dumas Roy (about global warming really...wonderful art)
• Sebastian and the Balloon by Philip C. Stead

Nonfiction:
• Hot Air Balloons by Joanne Mattern
• How Do Hot Air Balloons Work?  by Buffy Silverman

Novels:
• Emily Eyefinger and the Balloon Bandits by Duncan Ball
• Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman
• Meerkat Madness Flying High by Ian Whybrow

and two that are worth searching out in a library because they are out of print :
• Cinderella and the Hot Air Balloon by Ann Jungman
• The Balloon Farmer by Geoffrey Lehmann

21st June Meerkats

The meerkat toy is the most borrowed toy in the library. I bought it to go with Emily Gravett's Meerkat Mail,  but now Richard Byrne's Millicent and Meer and Jan Latta's Mia the Meerkat are borrowed just as much.

3rd May Suekichi Akaba (1910 - 1990) Ian Whybrow (1961)

Suekichi Akaba is a Hans Christian Andersen award winning, Japanese -born illustrator who had the centenary of his birth last year. He said, A picture book is not a picture gallery. Displaying good pictures one by one will not make a good picture book. What is important is the flow and the drama created by turning the pages. How true this is! He was 50 when he had his first picture book published. This was based on an old folktale and his subsequent books continued to be based on folktales. I have read that his illustrations use many different kinds of Japanese paper, each fulfilling a specific function or communicating specific moods and that he liked bright colours, but I have only seen Suho's White Horse so I cannot say this for myself.

In contrast Ian Whybrow is a very contemporary children's author from Britain who has written many books and has other people illustrate them. He used to be an English teacher and he certainly seems to know what children enjoy to read. He is best known in my library because of Harry and the Dinosaurs but there are other books just as worthy of mention. I particularly like Little Wolf from Little Wolf's Book of Badness fame and his series of beginning novels known as Books for Boys. He has just released a new junior novel called Meerkat Madness which I am sure will be a hit with my readers because they all seem to be besotted with meerkats. The real ones at Taronga Zoo are pretty special and very funny!

29th November Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) C.S.Lewis (1898 - 1963) Jane Tanner (1946) Jackie French (1953) Adrian Reynolds (1963)

What a lot of birthdays! The first two, Louisa May Alcott and C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis need very little introduction and their classics, Little Women and the Narnia series of books were written for children older than those I teach, even though they know of them from movies, so I do not intend to write about them.

Jane Tanner is an Australian illustrator who lives in Melbourne and was a secondary school art teacher before becoming a fulltime illustrator. Each of her illustrations looks like a painting that could be framed and as such her illustrations are meticulous. She rarely does more than a book every year or so. She has said, "I've always been fascinated by the changes in mood created by the play of light in a particular place and time..." and this can beseen clearly in her Children's Book Council Picture Book of the Year winner Drac and the Gremlin which is written by Allan Baillie. There's a Sea in My Bedroom is another popular book that Jane illustrated.

Jackie French is also Australian. She is an author and far more prolific than Jane Tanner. She writes for a broad age group, doing humorous picture books, short stories, historical novels for young adults, historical non fiction and even gardening books. Her website tells you all about her and her myriad of books. For my children it is hard to go past her Shaggy Gully Books, in particular Diary of a Wombat. This book with its very minimal text amuses readers of all ages. And her Wacky Families series amuses my good Year 2 readers. They like to work their way through the lot once they been hooked with the first one, usually My Auntie Chook the Vampire Chicken.

Adrian Reynolds is the British illustrator responsible for Harry and the Dinosaurs with the author Ian Whybrow. Their website is amazing. It provides you with all sorts of reading record proformas, information for parents who are reluctant to read to their children, and things to use in the classroom. Of course Adrian has illustrated other books as well. A favourite in the library is Who's in the Loo? by Jeanne Willis, but as well as other Jeanne Willis books , he has done Michael Rosen's books about Bear and books for Jonathan Emmett.