6th February Lame Duck Day

I was reading today and happened to notice that it was Lame Duck Day and that made me think that I hadn't written about ducks or Duck Day on this blog. Of course being a Lame Duck has very little to do with ducks, but given how many picture books feature ducks I got to thinking about them. Well there's Rubber Ducky Day ( January, 13th), Donald Duck Day (June, 9th) and even Dead Duck Day (June, 5th) but there does not appear to be World Duck Day or International Duck Day. What a shame. There are so many endearing ducks in picture books, starting with my all time favourite Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey.

The children I teach are aged between four and eight so their introduction to 'ducks' in picture books is usually a version of Five Little Ducks,  but very quickly they move to the series about ducks that we have in boxes in the library. There is
• Daisy Duck by Jane Simmons
• Duck and Goose by Tad Hills
• Baby Duck  by Amy Hest and Jill Barton
• Duck in a Truck  by Jez Alborough
• Sarah and Duck by Sarah Gomes Harris
• the madcap duck in What is Chasing Duck? in the Giggle Gang by Jan Thomas
• the zany Katy Duck by Alyssa Satin Capucilli and Henry Cole
• Duck Duck Dinosaur  by Kallie George and Oriol Vidal
• Duck Duck Porcupine by Salina Yoon.

Of course there's other ducks to fall in love with such as
• Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell and Helen Oxenbury
• Just Ducks  by Nicola Davies and Salvatore Rubbino
• Alexander in Alexander's Outing by Pamela Allen
• Ben and Duck by Sara Acton
• The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese, and the newer
• Duck!  by Meg McKinlay and Nathaniel Ekstrom
• I'm a Duck  by Eve Bunting and Will Hillenbrand
and if you are looking for a serial for this age group there's always Meg McKinlay and Leila Rudge's
• Duck For a Day  and Definitely No Ducks
And if this isn't enough duck books, look here.

17th July Suzanne McGuinness

Today is author/illustrator Suzanne McGuinness' birthday. I learned this courtesy of Eric at the Happy Birthday Author blog. It was fortuitous as I am planning my term's reading and one of the books on our Book Week shortlist is Meg McKinlay and Leila Rudge's beautiful book No Bears. I wanted to read this to my classes but also wanted to look at a book with a bear in it, that was published recently too. I chose My Bear Griz by Suzanne McGuinness because while it has a similar warmth for young children and an obvious point of view and storyteller, it has a very different style of illustration and is not Australian. I love the bear and despite knowing grizzly bears are dangerous, as someone who lives in a country without bears I do want to hug Griz. I am really looking forward to sharing these two books, identifying visual jokes and talking about similarities and differences with the students. I learned from Eric that this is Suzanne's first picture book so I will now stop looking for more as I have been doing. I thought she was English, but have learned that she is American. Now Suzanne we need more of your beautiful illustrations. You can see some on her website and blog.