18th June Go Fishing Day

It's winter in Australia, but yesterday was a glorious weather day here in Sydney and ideal fishing. My son was always keen to go fishing and luckily his dad often took him. I just do not have the patience! My son now works at a marina and has ample opportunities to fish. It is a shame he doesn't eat fish. Everything he catches goes back.

When he was young I really struggled to find books about fishing for him, but now I have built up quite a collection for the young children who use my library. See here. I don't know how many times I had to read A Fisherman's Tale  by Keith Faulkner. It was a family nightmare when it fell apart and no amount of contact could resurrect the flaps.

Below are two favourites and one I would like to source for my grandma friends who have to go fishing!

1st February 2011

Well I have done it, written every day for a year! I find it hard to believe. I did think I would stop now, but there are still a lot of books, illustrators and authors I could write about, so perhaps I will keep going, but not feel that I have to write every day. I think it is time to set up a library blog now that the teachers and parents at school can access. Maybe then the library newsletter that I do each term won't be needed. Having written over fifty of them, maybe I will suffer withdrawal from them as well.

Today I had the kindergarten classes for the first time. I love how keen they are to borrow a book for themselves. I love watching how they choose a book. I smile when I hear all the comments about paying and then I realise that outside of school my clientele are more likely to go to a bookshop or a video shop than a library, and because of this it is often hard to find books that they haven't seen before. For this reason I usually focus on 'oldies but goodies' with kindergarten when they first come to the library. I want them to see books they may not know. Today I didn't do that though. I shared books about loving books and wanting to share that love with others. We read Keith Faulkner and Jonathan Lambert's The Monster Who Loved Books. The class always gasp when the large popout characters seem to leap out from the pages. They love the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. They like it when we spot other fairytale characters and when we identify the nursery rhyme characters and have an excuse to say the rhymes. Then we read Dog Loves Books by Louise Yates. Louise hasn't illustrated a large number of books, but each of them is a gem and she is therefore an illustrator to watch. I don't know when her birthday is, but I am guessing she is young. Dog is a very gentle book lover who opens a book shop and waits for customers to come and buy his books. While he is waiting he does what we all do while we wait, he reads and escapes into his books. At the end of these two books everyone is chomping at the bit to borrow. So begins another year in the library and a new cohort of book enthusiasts!

For today's birthdays you will need to go back to 1st February 2010, the beginning of this blog.