21st June World Music Day

The Fête de la musique, also known in English as Music Day, Make Music Day or World Music Day, is an annual music celebration that takes place on 21 June. On Music Day the citizens of a city or country are allowed and urged to play music outside in their neighbourhoods or in public spaces and parks.

What fun! Let's make music!      

I used a new book by Sophy Henn  The Music in Me as a starting point and  to convince students they are all capable of making music. Then added

• Never Play Music Right Next Door to the Zoo by John Lithgow & Leeza Hernandez

• Animal Music by Julia Donaldson and Nick Sharratt

• The Musical Life of Gustav Mole by Patrick McNee & Kathryn Meyrick

• I am the the Music Man  by Debra Potter

• Ah, Music!  by Aliki

• Violet's Music by Angela Johnson & Laura Huliska-Beith

• Music is for Everyone Jill Barber by & Sydney Smith

• M is for Music by Kathleen Krull & Stacy Innerst 

• Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!  by Wynton Marsalis  & Paul Rogers

16th March Panda Day

On March 16, conservationists and animal lovers alike spread the word about one of the world’s most endangered and adored animals. Panda Day brings together the efforts of an international community dedicated to protecting and restoring habitat for pandas. Pandas are very sensitive creatures and disruptions in their environment lead to issues with them reproducing. They do not reproduce readily in captivity so this makes ensuring their natural habitat remains even more pertinent.



Fortunately, children are besotted with pandas so any display of books we do in the library which features them, is very quickly depleted, even more so than polar bears. It is good that these two 'bear' days are so close together as it means we can quickly replace one display with the other. Our library has ample books to do this. See pandas here and polar bears here.

Mr Panda books are such a favourite with the preschoolers and Kindergarten students so these five books are never in the library. Once they have gone though, there is still plenty of fiction to go round. For the same age group there is Neil Gaiman's Chu and Sophy Henn's Pom Pom.


For older students who also like a series of picture books about the same character there is Jon J. Muth's series about Stillwater. These require a more sophisticated level of  reading and beg discussion so they are good to read with an adult.

If you then read through the large number of other narrative and expository texts, there's still some beginning chapter books to explore!

Every March 16th

Hashtag

#PandaDay

Tagged as

1. Animals

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 Panda Day is dedicated to spreading awareness about this majestic teddy-bears of nature, spreading the word that deforestation is leading to the destruction of their habitats, and has placed them on the endangered animal list.