12th August Elephant Day

World Elephant Day is an international annual event on August 12, dedicated to the preservation and protection of the world's elephants. On August 12, 2012, the inaugural World Elephant Day was launched to bring attention to the urgent plight of Asian and African elephants. The elephant is loved, revered and respected by people and cultures around the world, yet we balance on the brink of seeing the last of this magnificent creature.

The theme for Elephant Day 2023 is  Safeguarding Elephant Habitats for a Sustainable Tomorrow

It is quite some time since I last wrote about Elephant Day and the library has some great books about elephants that are worth searching out.

• The Elephants Ears  by Catherine Chambers and Caroline Mockford is the perfect book to explain the difference between Asian and African elephants. It reads like a folktale, but what it explains to the reader is factual and easy to apply to photographs of elephants.

• Elephants  by Steve Bloom is a factual book for the whole family to share. It has amazing photographs with

Other factual books:

• Elephants  by Seymour Simon

• The Truth About Elephants  by Maxwell Eaton III

Books about why elephants need protection:

• Elephants on the Edge  by Charles Hope

• If Elephants Disappeared  by Lily Williams

• What the Elephant Heard by Charlotte Guillain and Sam Usher

Two books that show what can happen to elephants in the wild and the lengths we need to go to ensure they have a good life are:

• One Step at a Time  by Jane Jolly and Sally Heinrich

• The Elephant's New Shoe  by Laurel Neme and Ariel Landy

Two books that highlight elephants family structure:

• Grandma Elephant's in Charge by Martin Jenkins and Ivan Bates

• She Leads  by June Smalls and Yumi Shimokawara   

• My Bibi Always Remembers by Toni Buzzeo and Mike Wohnoutka

And of course, there's a myriad of great stories. See Pinterest here.

If you are lacking good nonfiction, you can always revel in elephant series that you have, such as Elmer (David McKee), Babar (Jean De Brunhoff), Elephant and Piggie (Mo Willems), The Large Family (Jill Murphy) or Ella the Elegant Elephant (Carmela D'Amico).

20th May World Bee Day

To raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face and their contribution to sustainable development the UN designated the 20th May be World Bee Day. In Australia World Bee Day is celebrated by getting as many children as possible to be involved in the Waggle Dance.

World Bee Day theme 2022 is “Bee engaged: Build Back Better for Bees”

In the library we have a 'bee' book display and there is so many really good books to choose from. See my Pinterest page here, but if you don't have many in your library and you are looking for some more, these five are outstanding, fairly recent and in print.

• Bee by Patricia Hegarty & Britta Teckentrup

• The Bee Book by Charlotte Milner

• When the Bees Buzzed Off by Lulu Bell & Stephen Bennett

• 1001 Bees by Joanna Rzezak

• If Bees Disappeared by Lily Williams

14th July Shark Awareness Day

It is Shark Awareness Day and coming up it will be Shark Week (starting on 22nd July), so I thought I would highlight two biographies that have been very popular at school. They are both about Eugenie Clark ((May 4, 1922 – February 25, 2015) ,  a respected American ichthyologist who was known as the Shark Lady. She studied shark behaviour and was a pioneer in the field of scuba diving for research purposes.

There's so many film clips, interviews and photos of Dr Clark on the web, but these two books show her as a person who really loved sharks and therefore had a great awareness of them.

Shark Lady  by Jess Keating and Marta Alvarez Miguens 

 Swimming With Sharks by Heather Lang and Jordi Solano

And another new book in the library that has proved popular is Lily Williams' If Sharks Disappeared.