5th June Gingerbread Day

It is Gingerbread Day! Not Gingerbread House Day. That is on 12th December. Gingerbread is 

often associated with Christmas because it is ideal in cold weather, but really you can cook, 

decorate and eat it any time of the year.

Gingerbread is a sweet and spicy cake-like biscuit that is traditionally made with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and molasses. It has a rich and warm flavour. Gingerbread has a long history and has been enjoyed for centuries in many different cultures. If you can find First Catch Your Gingerbread by Sam Bilton you will be well informed about all things - gingerbread.

My children loved making gingerbread men or gingerbread shapes. I think they just enjoyed using rolling pins and cookie cutters. If you have a young child raid your Maisy collection for:

So now to celebrate find a recipe for gingerbread and read The Gingerbread Man or any other book with gingerbread. 

From Minds In Bloom

You should have no trouble locating a traditional version of  The Gingerbread Man.

Our library has these:

What ever you choose, make sure it has all the great repetitive refrains and onomatopoeia so the children can join in.

Now you can explore all the 'spinoffs'!

There is a series by Laura Murray and Mike Lowery which includes:

• The Gingerbreadman Loose in the School     

• The Gingerbreadman Loose at Christmas

• The Gingerbreadman Loose on the Firetruck

 • The Gingerbreadman Loose at the Zoo

 • The Gingerbreadman and the Leprechaun Loose in the School

Another gingerbread series by Lisa Campbell Ernst includes:

• The Gingerbread Girl

• The Gingerbread Girl Goes Animal Crackers 

Author illustrator Jan Brett has three books:

•Gingerbread Baby; Gingerbread Friends  and Gingerbread Christmas. 

Online there is a myriad of activities to accompany these books.

And all the extras:

•  Georgie the Gingerbread Fairy by Tim Bugbird

• The Library Gingerbread Man  by Dotti Enderle

• Tough Cookie  by Edward Hemingway

 • How to Catch a Gingerbread Man  by Andy Eckerman

•  The Gingerbread Man 2 : What Happened Later?  by Stephen Dixon

• Hansel and Gretel's Gingerbread House  by Sue Nicholson

• Everyone Wants a Bite of the Gingerbread Man by Anthony Pinto

• Little Robin and the Delicious Gingerbreadman  by Elaina Moon

• The Gingerbread Star by Anne Fine

And if that's not enough, explore the ninjabread man...

• Kick! Jump! Chop! The Adventures of the Ninjabread Man by Heather Ayris Burnell

• Nanny Pastry and the Nimble Ninjabread Man by Gemma Clatworthy

• The Ninjabread Man by C.J.Leigh and Chris Gall

23rd November The Twelve Days of Christmas

Browsing through the Christmas picture books I noticed that Alison Jay has done a new version of The Twelve Days of Christmas and I picked it up for perusal, and while it does have beautiful artwork in her trademark style, I did wonder how many copies one library needs of this song, especially a school library like mine where school finishes for the summer holidays three weeks before Christmas and the teachers do so little Christmas-wise with their classes. Some very well known children's illustrators seem to have enjoyed creating their own version - see among others Susan Jeffers, Rachel Isadora, Brian Wildsmith, Jane Ray, Jan Brett, Robert Sabuda, Britta Teckentrup and Jane Cabrera.

One of the most popular holiday songs of all time, 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' probably originated in France during the late Middle Ages and became popular in England as a chant sung without music. The 12 days are traditionally those following Christmas, with the last day being the end of the season. Over the years the lyrics have changed but the song remains a perennial favourite. 

I sometimes use the song to explain to students that the twelve days are the twelve days after Christmas Day that take us up to Epiphany, the day when the three kings went to visit baby Jesus and the day when traditionally we take down our Christmas tree and decorations.

As well there are many spin offs designed to suit a particular place. There are African (A Stork in a Baobab) and Latino (A Piñata in a Pine Tree) versions and here in Australia there are a myriad of innovations, with emus, kookaburras and platypuses up gum trees and even an underwater version by Kim Michelle Toft. The original by June Williams and John McIntosh is gentle and almost reverent, the newer ones such as the Heath McKenzie version and the Colin Buchanan version are loud and boisterous. At the Lifeline Book Fair this weekend near my home I could have bought a number of each version for as little as fifty cents each! Perhaps good for compare and contrast activities and as background to making your own.

10th February Umbrella Day

Tomorrow, 10th February is Umbrella Day, a day in honor of one of the world's most invaluable inventions. Time to look at how umbrellas feature in art and literature. Look for a print of and discuss Auguste Renior's famous painting The Umbrellas. Look at paintings of Manet and Seurat which also feature umbrellas but where they are more likely to be used to keep the sun off rather than rain. If we take into account when these paintings were done we can see that umbrellas and parasols have been in existence for a long time. When were they invented and by whom?

Four picture books that depict umbrellas and their usefulness are:

• Umbrella by Taro Yashima. This book is now very old, but like Yashima's Crow Boy is destined to be a classic and still easily locatable. Momo gets an umbrella for her birthday and then has to wait a long time before it rains.

• The Umbrella by Jan Brett is a retelling of the folktale The Mitten with a shift in setting. It is set in the cloud forest of Costa Rica and animals native to there use the umbrella as a refuge.

• The Umbrella Queen by Shirin Yim Bridges and Taeeun Yoo. This is a lovely book, set in Thailand and tells the story of Noot, a young girl who paints elephants on umbrellas. Noot dares to be different an is rewarded for her spirit while still abiding by her family traditions.

• Ella's Umbrellas by Jennifer Lloyd and Ashley Spires is a fun story about Ella who has an obsession with collecting umbrellas and her mother wants her to get rid of them because her grandmother is coming.

1st December Jan Brett (1949)

Jan Brett is an American author illustrator with a long list of books to her credit. Her website is a teacher's treasure trove. It has teaching ideas, reader's theatre scripts, worksheets, craft templates, videos and interviews. There is everything you would ever need to do an author study! At this time of year you could just do her Christmas titles! My library has Twelve Days of Christmas, The Night Before Christmas, and Christmas Trolls and there are others. Yesterday a class at school cooked Christmas biscuits. This could have been done using Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby book, the gingerbread recipe and video from her website. My favourite of Jan's many books is Honey...Honey... Lion! because having read about a honey badger in Mwenye Hadithi's Lazy Lion the children wanted to find out more about them and we found this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Jan Brett's animals are always a joy, full of personality, very detailed and in realistic contexts. She does hedgehogs so well, like Jackie French does wombats and I have just read on her website that she has a pet hedgehog, so no wonder. Jan has illustrated a myriad of fairytales, fables and poems.