3rd April Find a Rainbow Day

How appropriate that there is a day such as this when we are in the middle of a crisis.

Rainbows are symbols of many things, peace, hope, prosperity, new beginnings and good luck, so no wonder  the Irish believe there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The rainbow is a comprised of seven different colours.  Each of these colours is vibrant and beautiful, and each one is different than the next. This conveys a beautiful message of inclusiveness and cohesion. It demonstrates how beautiful diversity can be, but these colours work together to make a new beautiful whole so it can also be about working together.

Rainbows are often seen after a storm when the sun breaks through the clouds. This provides us with a very powerful message. Good and beautiful things often follow the darkest storms. We need to remember this right now!

I walked up my street (exercise) and counted how many rainbow paintings were affixed in windows. I counted eight in my neighbourhood. These children have done these paintings to thank all the health workers who are at work saving lives . In fact it was this that sent me looking for rainbow stories for a virtual display. It has to just be a pinterest page  because I'm not at school in my library for a while.

While looking I learned that it was Find a Rainbow Day!  this week, which gave me another reason to put together the list of books.

Thinking of rainbow stories, the first one I thought of was Annie's Rainbow by Ron Brooks. It is old and long out of print, but a real favourite when I first started teaching. Annie loves rainbows and whenever she sees one she tries to catch it. She just wants one of her own. What a wonderful thing to think you could do! What else is there?

I remember reading Esther's Rainbow by Kim Kane and Sara Acton to a preschool class last year and they really enjoyed it. It is a joyous story about a girl who also sees colours everywhere and goes looking for them.

A parent came to the library last week when we were still open wanting The Rainbow Plate a story by doctor Preeya Alexander, which she wrote to encourage children to eat fruit and vegetables of a variety of colours. There are other books too about eating the rainbow.

I like the concept and the fun of How the Crayons Saved the Rainbow by Monica Sweeney. Just like the children around here, the crayons draw rainbows all over the place. There are so many versions of this on Youtube!

And then for older students there is the colorful picture book biography Newton's Rainbow by Kathryn Lasky that celebrates Newton's discoveries that illuminated the mysteries of gravity, motion, and even rainbows, discoveries that gave mankind a new understanding of the natural world, discoveries that changed science forever. 

So lots of avenues to explore while you're looking for rainbows and hoping for an end to the isolation of Covid 19.

7th June Butterfly Day

In the UK today is designated Butterfly Education and Awareness Day, a day to make people aware of the role of butterflies in pollination and what they can do to ensure there are butterfly habitats close to them. Butterflies are certainly fascinating creatures because of their beauty and delicacy.

Many children's books focus on butterflies, but the ones here, I have included because of their illustrations and/or stories rather than their factual information. They will certainly cover a wide range of uses.

1. Butterfly by Petr Horacek.
2. A Butterfly is Patient  by Dianna Hutts Acton and Sylvia Long.
3. Caterpillar Butterfly by Vivian French and Charlotte Voake.
4.  Caterpillar and Butterfly by Ambelin Kwaymullina.
5.  Ten Little Caterpillars by Bill Martin Jnr and Lois Ehlert.
6.  I Wish I Were a Butterfly by James Howe and Ed Young.
7. Velma Gratch and the Way Cool Butterfly by Alan Madison and Kevin Hawkes.
8.  Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle and Julie Paschkis

For more butterfly titles including expository texts see Pinterest here.

28th August Roger Duvoisin (1904 - 1980) Tasha Tudor (1915 - 2008) Phyllis Krasilovsky (1926) Allen Say (1937) Kevin Hawkes (1959)

Five birthdays...too many to contemplate especially as the last two really deserve to have an entry to themselves. Following will be only a little on each.

Swiss-born American Roger Duvoisin is best known for his humorous book about Petunia, a goose who carries round a book in the hope that she will become wise.

American illustrator Tasha Tudor has more than ninety books, none of which have become well-known in Australia. An American ex-pat mother introduced her books to me about ten years ago. She was concerned that we had no halloween titles in the school library, despite the number of American families at the school, so she donated some to us. Among them was Halloween Moonshine which clearly shows Tasha Tudor's love of gardens, nature and the joy of home and small things.

I cannot find out much about Phyllis Krasilovsky. I wondered if she is Dutch, given the Dutch content in some of her books. My favourite of her books is the Peter Spier illustrated The Cow Who Fell in the Canal. Kindergarten have revisited it this week as part of a unit of work on Van Gogh's bridges for the Book Week Expo.

Allen Say was born in Japan to a Korean father and a Japanese-American mother. He moved to America when he was sixteen and came to the notice of the children's literature fraternity when he won the Caldecott Medal for Grandfather's Journey, a partly autobiographical picture book about his grandfather's journey from Japan to America. Many of his illustrations have a photographic quality complete with white borders. His books demand discussion and rereadings.

American illustrator, Kevin Hawkes, is so versatile. Every one of his books stands alone. You don't pick his books up and immediately say, 'oh that is a Kevin Hawkes' book'. Three of my favourite books, Weslandia written by Paul Fleischman; Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen; and The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky are all illustrated by Kevin Hawkes and in very different styles of illustration. He can be serious or he can show his dry sense of humour. How did he come up with so many animal bottoms for Michael Ian Black's Chicken Cheeks?

22nd February Michelle Knudsen (1974)

The library only has one title by Michelle Knudsen, the wonderful The Library Lion which I have already spoken about in relation to starting the year in the library with a new set of children, such as Kindergarten. It has so much scope for discussion of your library rules. The children love Miss Merriweather and the lion and I often have children draw a lion and write something that he says about the library. The children often comment too on the paleness of the illustrations. They think they are old fashioned so I go to great lengths to convince them libraries are not old-fashioned!

This week I covered and catalogued a new book called Chicken Cheeks. The illustrations are brightly coloured, humorous and cheeky! I was surprised to see that they were Kevin Hawkes' illustrations! So different from those in The Library Lion. He certainly is versatile. Back to Chicken Cheeks,you'll love it. How many words can you list for 'bottom' before you need a thesaurus? I doubt you will come up with as many as Michael Ian Black does here. Here there is an abundance of animals displaying their butts to the reader and each sitting on top of another. Each animal has a different word for their posterior, carefully chosen to rhyme, alliterate or just simply amuse. The book does have a plot though and rollicks along well right to the final pun on the back cover!