20th July 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing (Part 1)

Fifty years ago, on July, 20th, 1969 everyone watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon. I was one of the watchers. I was in my first year of high school and the whole school gathered in the school hall to watch a very small black and white television that was on a trolley on the stage. We sat in age order, the older Year 12s at the front of the hall back to Year 7 at the back. As you can imagine I saw nothing, but the significance of the moment was not lost on me. After all the moon is the only place in our solar system that humans have visited. Recently I had lunch with a group of girls I went to school with and we laughed as we reminisced about this occasion. 

Several new picture books have been published to commemorate this occasion, so I put together a large display of books in my library to share the occasion with today's students and their parents. They have been very slow to move out of the library and I am hoping that once they have been exposed to more of it on the television and internet, that they will come back after the school holidays and be more enthusiastic about borrowing them. In the past the young students I teach have been very interested in space, but not so much anymore.

Among the new books are

• Moonwalkers  by Mark Greenwood and Terry Denton
• Touch the Moon  by Phil Cummings and Coral Tulloch
• When We Walked on the Moon by David Long and Sam Kalda
• Moon! Earth's Best Friend by Stacy McAnulty
• Moonshot by Brian Floca (an expanded and reissued version of a book published ten years ago)
• Moon's First Friends: One Giant Leap for Friendship by Susannah Leonard Hill and Elisa Paganelli
• Go For the Moon: A Rocket, a Boy and the First Moon Landing  by Chris Gall
• The Usborne Book of the Moon  by Laura Cowan and Diana Toledana

And if you don't have access to these new books perhaps revisit some of the gems from the past like
• The Sea of Tranquility by Mark Haddon and Christian Birmingham
• One Giant Leap by Robert Burleigh and Mark Wimmer
• If You Decide to Go to the Moon  by Faith McNulty and Steven Kellogg
• Grandpa Takes Me to the Moon  by Timothy R. Gaffney and Barry Root
• Armstrong: The Adventurous Journey of a Mouse to the Moon  by Torben Kuhlmann

21st September World Gratitude Day

World Gratitude Day is a day when we should all stop to be grateful for all that is good in our world. At school we do talk to children about what they are thankful for, we talk about bucket filling and being good community members. Many families and teachers have a Blessings Jar or Gratitude Journal. I have just read an adult novel called The Happiness Jar where a girl with cystic fibrosis, despite all her health issues lives life to the fullest and records all the things that she is grateful for in her happiness jar. Perhaps it is something we should do more about with our privileged students at a time when many children still do not have the opportunity to go to school or live in a safe environment. We could do this without scaring them as much of the current refugee news is prone to do with the very young students I teach.  Americans have Thanksgiving, but here in Australia we don't have a specific day to say thank you or express gratitude and perhaps we should. These four books could help you start a discussion with very young children.

 Today is also World Alzheimer's Day. If you are not affected by this awful disease you have another good reason to be grateful. I have written about this day before and while many new books have been published since, such as Phil Cummings' Newspaper Hats and Ellie Royce's Lucas and Jack you still might find these other titles useful.

12th May Kite Day

I read somewhere that it is Kite Day on the 12th May, but on further reading there seems to be a lot of different Kite Days. Flying kites can be such fun for young children and making them even more fun so you probably don't need an excuse to share books about kites at all. In Sydney we have the Festival of Winds in September and I have written about it before here. I wrote here too about my all time favourite kite book, Marcia Vaughan and Patricia Mullins' The Sea Breeze Hotel, but your library might have it. While you are searching look for Marty and Mei-Ling by Phil Cummings and Craig Smith. It too is out of print but also has kite flying as a wonderful community-building catalyst. Two newer books which might inspire you to make and fly kites are:

• Kite Flying by Grace Lim and

• Kite Day by Will Hillenbrand

And while trawling through Google images I found this art work, great to initiate a discussion of the whole role of kites in Japanese culture and to pull out beautiful picture books about Japan.

22nd December Jerry Pinkney (1939) Phil Cummings (1957) Jarrett J. Krosoczka (1977)

Jerry Pinkney is the American author illustrator who won the Caldecott Medal last year for his amazingly beautiful rendition of the fable The Lion and the Mouse. It is almost wordless and even if you didn't know the story the pictures are enough. He has won many awards and the opening words on his website tell you why. "I am a storyteller at heart. So each project begins with the question, 'Is this story worth telling? Is the manuscript an interesting read? Is it surprising and challenging? Will I, in the process of making pictures, learn something new?'" Looking at the detail in his illustrations and the amount of time spent even on the endpages (see Noah's Ark) you know that Jerry Pinkney loves his job and takes it very seriously.

Australian author, Phil Cummings on the other hand does not take his writing so seriously. Most of his books, especially his bridging novels are humorous and his picture book Boom Bah! with illustrations by Nina Rycroft is lots of fun (and noise) when shared with very young readers. I particularly like using his picture books Midge, Mum and the Neighbours and Marty and Mei-Ling (both out of print) with classes during units of work that require a community, school, families, multicultural-type focus or which deal with prejudice, identity or social interaction.

American author illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka is new to me, but I cannot wait to read Baghead with a class next year and make them! It may well be a one-hit wonder because books like this don't sustain many readings once you know the reason, but I can see librarians and teachers having fun with it.