9th January Word Nerd Day

My siblings think I'm a word nerd! The teachers at school think I'm a word nerd! So I guess I am. I prefer to say that words really interest me, their origins, purpose and power. I love picking up a picture book and reading sections to my colleague in the library. We both revel in great vocabulary and lyrical text. At the end of last year Britta Teckentrup's new book When I See Red  was being catalogued and we stopped to chat about it. I buy Britta's books because they never seem to disappoint. The illustrations are always stunning and we marvel at her output, but this book has an accompanying text which is also outstanding.

The heroine of this beautifully illustrated story feels her anger like a storm in a dark forest. It sweeps her away, and she thunders and howls. She pours down her emotions like sheets of rain; rage surges like a wind whipping angry waves. Her anger takes her on a wild ride.

The size of the font changes as her anger grows and abates. It is just so powerful. The words themselves tumble down the page, and their placement and size, as well as their meaning, effectively at generates the girl's spirit of rage and anger.

So many picture books have words that paint pictures just as much as the illustrations. I should make a bigger effort to record books that do this for me. I remember reading Ed and Rebecca Emberley's The Ant and the Grasshopper  and being astounded by the opening word image.

Somewhere on the boulevard of backyards an ant was struggling with the remnants of a picnic.

I doubt that many of my early readers would fully understand the meaning of the words 'boulevard' and 'remnants' within this context, but would I therefore not read the book to them, or worse still stop to explain what it means. Of course not. I would read the story and allow them to hear amazing vocabulary and maybe unpack it much later when we have enjoyed the story and the illustrations as a whole.

I have a box of 'word' books in the library for teachers and students to borrow for their reading and writing mentor lessons, but many of these books are more about collecting words and varying words than the beauty of them. See what is in the box here. This Pinterest page is obviously about more than just sharing picture book titles, but in amongst other things there are plenty of books to hunt out.

Among my favourites:

Phileas's Fortune  by Agnes de Lestrade and Valeria Docampo

The Word Wizard by Cathryn Falwell

The Word Collector  by Peter Reynolds 

One Word Pearl by Nicole Groeneweg and Hazel Mitchell

It is such a shame we are on holidays and I cannot do a display or plan a lesson. I would read 

One Word From Sophia  by Jim Averbeck and Yasmeen Ismail.

What is the 'one word'?

4th May International Respect for Chickens Day

I read about this day online and thought how appropriate as it is a subject I have needed to source books on over the years. The preschoolers and Year 2 at school often have eggs in incubators as part of project based learning or a unit of inquiry that studies life cycles.  see my pinterest page for some of the myriad of books on this topic. Year 1 does a unit on fairy tales and to accompany this in the library we look at chicken and fox stereotypes in narratives.

Chickens are common characters in children's stories and they usually behave in common ways so they are easy to study and make generalisations about. The classic Rosie's Walk is well known to most children and because it is humorous they are very willing to come up with adjectives to describe the hen and the fox. It is the perfect book to start with. Then we look at the traditional story Chicken Licken, (also known as Henny Penny and Chicken Little). You must look at the Emberley's Chicken Little. The illustrations and language will make you smile all day. Which adjectives on our lists apply to the chicken and fox here? Then we compare this chicken with the chicken in The Cock the Mouse and the Little Red Hen. The illustrations and language in this story make the stereotypes very obvious and tap into how fairytales are about good versus evil. These stories also allow for discussion of why sometimes the hen dies and sometimes it doesn't and the same with the fox in the second story. The rich vocabulary allows for discussion of why sometimes the fox lives in a den, sometimes a lair or even a cave. Next I look at the story of Chaunticleer from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by using Helen Ward's beautiful The Cockerel and the Fox. From here there are so many other stories where a gullible or enterprising chicken takes on a cunning fox.

See:

 


• Henry and the Fox by Chris Wormell
• Hattie and the Fox by Mem Fox
• Albert and Lila  by Rafik Schami
• A Very Proper Fox by Jan Fearnley
• The Chicken Thief by Beatrice Rodriguez

30th October Monsterfeast

With the run up to Halloween, I have been having fun with my preschool classes. We have been sharing monster stories and talking about what makes a monster, a monster, what makes them scary and how can you tell if they are scary? Of course the monster picture books in my library are not ones that are likely to give the children nightmares and most of the time the children thought they looked friendly 'because they are smiling'. It was good to see them interpret body language as well as their behaviour and spoken words.

First, we read with The Snagglegrollop by Daniel Postgate and Nick Price. The children loved identifying the parts he had - a nose like an elephant, horns like a goat, warts like a frog! Then in the story he meets a Quibblesnuff and they fall in love. The children were rolling on the floor. Then they decided they weren't at all interested in scaring children.

Secondly, we read The Scariest Monster in the World by Lee Weatherly and Algy Craig Hall. This monster smiled on the cover and rubbed his head like he was thinking. 'Not scary' the children predicted. He gets the hiccups and the children had great fun making the hiccup noises. He needs to be scared and the animals show him a mirror which fixes him. The children really liked this solution.

Next I thought we might turn the tables and read about monsters who were scared of children. We read Pog by Lynn Lee and Kim Gamble where the monster is scared of children. This Australian book is out of print, so if you can't find it in a library you could substitute Billy Monster's Daymare by Alan Durant and Ross Collins which is based on the same idea.

All in all the monster books have been very popular, frequently borrowed and a big success. Today in browsing time I caught a group of Kindergarten children poring over The Monster Shop by Julie Beech and trying to decide which monster they liked best and would buy given the choice.

Other popular monster books in the library are:
• Bedtime for Monsters by Ed Vere
• No Monsters Allowed! by Tracey Hammet and Jan McCafferty
• A Rumpus in the Night! and Another Rumpus by Nick Ward
• Stomp! by Jeanne Willis and Paul Howard
• If You're a Monster and You Know It by Rebecca Emberley
• There Was an Old Monster by Rebecca Emberley

19th October Ed Emberley (1931) Lisa Westberg Peters (1951)

Ed Emberley is the patriarch of a very creative family. Together with his wife Barbara, a librarian, who retold the folk tale for him to illustrate, he published award winning Drummer Hoff. By himself he has produced a large number of drawing books, that children can use to make their own illustrations, and which a group of adults have used to produce large public storyboards. Together with daughter, Rebecca he has produced many lovely, brightly coloured, very distinctive picture books, many of which are about monsters. His other child Michael Emberley is a well-known illustrator, his granddaughter Adrian has published books with him and her mother and he is the father-in-law of author/ illustrator Marie -Louise Fitzpatrick. What a family! The Red Hen, his newest collaboration with daughter, Rebecca ids just about to be released. Of course it is a twist on that favourite, The Little Red Hen.

Lisa Westberg Peters is an American author who has a strong interest in science and her best books reflect this. Two books that are in the library that Year 1 make good use of during their unit of enquiry that looks at what is under the ground are Earthshake; Poems From the Ground Up and Volcano Wakes Up!