30th April Children's Day/Book Day

Today is my daughter's birthday and she is visiting America. I hope she visits a bookshop or library and gets involved in activities designed to celebrate Children's Day/Book Day, also known as El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Día). It is an American celebration of children, families, and reading held annually on April 30. The celebration emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This is in America, but there is no reason why we could not adopt aims such as these in multicultural Australia and have an annual, special celebration linking children to books, home languages and cultures around the country in schools, libraries, and bookstores. Days such as Día provide a wonderful opportunity for parents to promote the power of books by reading to their own children. Every day of the year can be “Día,” a day for linking all children and books!

The number of bilingual and foreign language books in my library is small, but growing. Of course we have more French and Spanish books because they are the foreign languages taught at the school, but we also have some books written in indigenous Aboriginal languages as well as in English.

Having a day such as this, especially if we celebrated it alongside or together with World Mother Tongue Day/ International Mother Language Day (21st February) would mean that schools would put more effort into the parent/child/reading relationship and themes such as this year's Book Week one, One World, Many Stories would be easier to make meaningful at a school where these ideas can become quite tokenistic.

2nd April Hans Christian Andersen (1805 - 1875) International Children's Book Day Amy Schwartz World Autism Day

Today is International Children's Book Day in honour of Hans Christian Andersen's birthday and as usual IBBY has produced a poster. This year's theme is The Book Remembers and it is by Estonian illustrator Juri Mildeberg.

It is also Amy Schwartz's birthday. She is an American author illustrator whose work I know very little about as

I have only seen a couple of her books. The library has What James Likes Best, which won the 2004 Charlotte Zolotow Award. This is a great honour, given that it is awarded to the author of the best picture book text published in the USA in the

preceding year. It seems as if we should have more of her books!

Thirdly, it is World Autism Day, also known as World Autism Awareness Day. The aim of this day is to increase people's awareness about people, especially children with autism. This is becoming easier to do using children's books because of titles such as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Cynthia Lord's Rules. Although many of the books for younger children are still overly didactic anything by Kathy Hoopman who writes about Asperger's Syndrome is worth exploring and the picture book Looking After Louis by Lesley Ely and Polly Dunbar is especially good for looking at the consequences of mainstreaming children with autism and thus increasing tolerance of difference. This story is told from the point of view of a girl who sits next to Louis, an autistic boy who is a loner, repeats things he hears, mimicks adults and gets away with behaviour that wouldn't be tolerated from the other children. This book should help initiate good discussion. Another picture book worth searching out is My Brother Sammy by Becky Edwards and David Armitage. In this story Sammy does not go to a mainstream class and he is constantly ruining his brother's things. His brother just wants Sammy to be a 'normal' brother.

2nd April Hans Christian Andersen (1805 - 1875) International Children's Book Day Ruth Heller (1923 - 2004) Emily Rodda (1948)

Today is Hans Christian Andersen's birthday and it is the day that the International Board of Books for Young People (IBBY) chose to celebrate annually as the day to inspire young children to read and to promote quality children's books the world over, that is it is International Children's Book Day. Each year IBBY produces a poster, such as the one above which is the 2010 one. Every two years they also announce the winners of the Hans Christian Andersen Award. This prestigious award is given to an author, this year to David Almond from the United Kingdom and an illustrator, this year to Jutta Bauer from Germany.

Hans Christian Andersen needs no introduction. His stories continue to be read by children, especially as many accomplished illustrators continue to illustrate versions of his stories as single picture books. The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and The Princess and the Pea are popular with the children in my library.

Ruth Heller's book, Chickens Aren't the Only Ones is always popular, especially when it is Easter or school has eggs incubating. It does not matter that it is old or that other authors have written about the same thing. The combination of Ruth's bright colours and just the right amount of information makes it work beautifully. It also goes beyond birds and reptiles when looking

at who lays eggs.

Lastly, it is Australian author Emily Rodda's birthday. Really it must be Jennifer Rowe's birthday because Emily Rodda is a pen name used by adult book author Jennifer Rowe when she is writing books for children. She is well known in the library because of the Deltora Quest; Fairy Realm and Squeak Street series.