9th September Chrysanthemum Day Teddy Bear Day

Two good reasons to celebrate. Chrysanthemum Day is celebrated in Japan on this day. It is one of five sacred festivals of ancient Japan. A wondrous display of chrysanthemums is presented on this day. These flowers seem to keep resurfacing for all sorts of things besides Mothers' Day. I always like to discuss these flowers and the number of flowers that have their names used as girls' names when I read Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes.

The other reason to celebrate Teddy Bear Day, is much easier to amass children's picture books for, there are just so many of them, besides all the well known favourites such as Corduroy, Paddington, Winnie-the-Pooh, Susanna Gretz's Teddybears series and all of Jane Hissey's gang of Old Bear's friends. A nice one to start with is Gillian Shields and Sebastien Braun's The Beginner's Guide to Bears. In Sydney next month (16th Oct) there will be the Children's Hospital's annual Teddy Bears' Picnic and then there will be teddy bears out in force. In preparation why not have a teddy bears picnic at school and the library is a good place to have it!

1st September Jane Hissey (1952)

English illustrator, Jane Hissey began her children's book career because a publisher spotted a series of greeting cards she had done and encouraged her to write and illustrate a children's book using the characters depicted on her cards. Her first book Old Bear was published in 1988 and other books with the same nursery characters followed. Hissey's characters are drawn from real life and feature her own toys. The library has the characters Little Bear and Jolly Tall as toys to loan out with the books and the videos of the stories are probably even more popular than the books. All of her stories about childhood toys who come to life are gentle and very young children feel very safe and content while viewing or listening to them. In this sense they are old-fashioned, by today's standards but my feeling is that they are good for encouraging children to be involved in their own creative play.