17th June Eat Your Vegetables Day

The goal of  a day such as this is to have a vegetable with every meal, and to also have a vegetable as a snack during the day.

If you’re a parent, you might want to get your kids, particularly fussy-eater ones who baulk at their vegetables to help with preparing, cooking or buying some vegetables or even  doing some craft using food. 

Read Off to Market  by Alice Oehr before you make a shopping list.

Read Eating the Alphabet  or Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert or a recipe book like Every Color Soup before you cook.

Look at books such as The Potato People , I Spy Food, and One Potato  and then have some fun with food.

There are so many picture books now where foods are heroes and personified that reading about vegetables with children is easy. Have you seen the Supertato books by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet, Runaway Pea by Kjartan Poskitt and Alex Wilmore, Dinosaur Juniors by Rob Biddulph, Vegetables in Underwear by Jared Chapman, the Peas Series by Keith Baker, Rot by Ben Clanton or the Food Group books by Jory John and Pete Oswald. In these books vegetables have fun! 

There are two series for beginning readers to read  themselves too... Cookie and Broccoli and Wedgieman. 

If you are looking for other books about vegetables look here.

8th - 12th October Cephalopod Awareness Days

'Every year from the 8th to the 12th of October, International Cephalopod Awareness Days come around to teach the world about cephalopods. This event is all about celebrating and sharing how fascinating and incredible they are!

Cephalopods are a class of marine invertebrates that are easy to recognize by all their arms and tentacles. They are part of the Phylum Mollusca, which means they’re related to other animals with soft bodies and shells, like snails and clams. Unlike the other molluscs, though, cephalopods have large brains and are known for their intelligence. Cephalopods are also interesting because they have three hearts and blue blood. They have highly developed eyes, and they have an amazing ability to camouflage because their skin can quickly change color and texture.'

Each of the days is designated:

October 8 – Octopus Day, for all the eight-armed species

October 9 – Nautilus Night, a time for all the lesser-known extant cephalopods

October 10 – Squid Day/Cuttlefish Day, or Squidturday, covering the tentacular species

October 11 – Myths and Legends Day, for all the fantastical cephalopods of movies, literature and legend. Release the Kraken!

October 12 – Fossil Day (to coincide with National Fossil Day), for all the incredible suckers that have gone extinct.

Kindergarten's unit of enquiry this term is to do with the sea, so there isn't anything left in my library to display, but if I could these books would be there to borrow:

Two that I especially like are new and they do what a lot of good nonfiction for younger children does so well. Look for Octopuses One to Ten by Ellen Jackson and Robin Page and Octopus Escapes Again by Laurie Ellen Angus.
And I would really like to see this one, Giant Squid because I am a fan of Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann and I'm sure it will be good.

We have a lovely octopus toy so I will need to do this display at some time earlier in the year.

P.S. Why do we spell molluscs with a 'c' and Americans put a 'k' so it is mollusks?

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6th July Kathi Appelt (1954)

I know very little about Kathi Appelt other than that we have three of her books in the library, so when I found it was her birthday I went searching. From her website I learned that she was born on the way to hospital in her father's Ford. Wow, I thought that was unusual when I read that Mini Grey was born in a Mini, but maybe not, when here is another author admitting to this mode of birth. Using Mini Grey's logic though, Kathi would have been named Ford! Maybe we can extend the logic and say that if you want to be a children's writer organise to be born in a car!

The other thing I learned about her is that she is very supportive of librarians and made a film clip expressing this fact, Love Song for Librarians. I hope some student of mine ends up being a writer and says such nice things about their school librarian. I do try to source books for specific children and I do think it is important to match children to books.

The books we have are Elephants Aloft; I See the Moon and Bats Around the Clock, but she has written many more. I particularly like Elephants Aloft because it cleverly written using only prepositions and Keith Baker's wonderful illustrations. Kathi has written a series of picture books about bats and they are illustrated by Melissa Sweet, another of my favourite illustrators so I should source the rest of these.

18th March

Now for the rest of yesterday's birthdays.

Wendell Minor is an American illustrator whose style of illustration is often larger than life, but so realistic that you also feel as if you are there having the experience depicted. In his new book where the illustrations accompany the words of the Gordon Titcomb song, The Last Train, you feel as if you are on the train or watching it across a field. His books that accompany Jean Craighead George's closely observed nature texts also bring you up close to the animals. See The Last Polar Bear; Snow Bear and The Wolves Are Back. Other books where Wendell has brought experience to life are Buzz Aldrin's Reach For the Sky and Look to the Stars.

Patrick McDonnell is an American cartoonist with a very successful comic strip about a dog called Mutts, but I first met his work when I bought his picture book Art and was enamoured of both the text and art. It too is cartoony, but it has Pollock-type artwork and Harold of purple crayon fame type imagination and makes a fun book about a small boy named Art. Recently I read about Patrick's new book to be released in April. Called Me...Jane, it is a biography of Jane Goodall and her gorillas. I can't wait to see it.

And lastly, Keith Baker who is also an American illustrator. I do not know his birth date, but I do know I love his illustrations and cannot wait to have fun with L M N O Peas and Potato Joe when Kindergarten are doing food. His other books are just as special and lend themselves to maths activities, units of enquiry or simply literature response. The Magic Fan has a text, art and paper engineering to elicit extensive discussion and given the recent tsunami in Japan it is extremely pertinent.