18th September World Bamboo Day

September 18th  is World Bamboo Day!

World Bamboo Day is a day of celebration to increase the awareness of bamboo globally. Where bamboo grows naturally, bamboo has been a daily element, but its utilisation has not always been sustainable due to exploitation. 

The World Bamboo Organisation aims to bring the potential of bamboo to a more elevated exposure – to protect natural resources and the environment, to ensure sustainable utilisation, to promote new cultivation of bamboo for new industries in regions around the world, as well as promote traditional uses locally for community economic development.

World Bamboo Day is about all things bamboo : sustainability, environment, ecology, science, 

architecture, art, music, food, housing, habitat, restoration, aesthetics, economy, utilization, everything. 

It is about the connections and the networks, about promotion and about our planet's future.

To celebrate it the way we do here on this blog, it needs to be connected to books, picture books in 

particular. Of course the students know all about the animals that eat bamboo, they know that some things

 are made of bamboo, but what else is there?

Let's see...

• Bamboo  by  Joyce Markovics 

Did you know that bamboo is one of nature's best friends? Learn about how it helps support a healthy environment and benefits people. In addition, readers will uncover how bamboo is food for rare animals and can be used to build many things. This colourful title includes sidebars, glossary, index, and activity about how readers can nurture nature. 

• Bamboo and Me: Exploring Bamboo's Many Uses in Everyday Life by Xu Bin and Yuan Yahuan 

Is bamboo a food, a grass, or a wood? One little boy knows that it's all three! Told in both English and Chinese,

 Bamboo and Me is the story of a little boy whose house was surrounded by many bamboo forests 

and streams. He lived with bamboo all year round. In spring, he ate delicate and delicious bamboo shoots; 

in summer, he crafted pliant bamboo stalks into baskets and brooms that he used as tools for fishing; in fall, 

he used mature bamboo to build kites that flew high and far; in winter, pork cooked with bamboo shoots was 

the celebratory dish for his family's New Year's Eve dinner.

• I Can Eat With Chopsticks: A Tale of the Chopstick Brothers and How they Became a Pair

 by Lin Xin

This beautifully illustrated bilingual Chinese and English storybook welcomes you to enjoy a light-hearted story of 

how chopsticks became the main eating utensil of the Chinese People. 

When Little Mo picks up a small bamboo stick from the bamboo forest, she has no idea that it will eventually 

lead to one of China's most significant inventions.

• The Pandas and their Chopsticks by Demi

Eating bamboo shoots with chopsticks three feet long? Impossible, you say. 

Not if you are a playful panda and learn to share and work together with your friends! 

•  Pip and the Bamboo Path  by Jesse Hodgson

In the great forested heights of the Himalayas, a great many species live peacefully... but their lives are 

changing forever as humans cut down the trees that these creatures call home.  As Pip and her family of red 

pandas are forced to find a new home, they support each other through their long, cold journey.

• Bamboo  by Paul Yee and Shaoli Wang

This tale is set in turn-of-the-centuryChina. When Bamboo, a young farmer, sets off to try to earn a fortune in the 

New World, his sister-in-law schemes to steal his ancestral lands, but the magic bamboo that his new wife, Ming, has 

brought as a gift saves his life and brings the family life-long prosperity.

19th September International Red Panda Day

Red pandas are not as popular as giant pandas in children's books, but they still manage to find their way into endearing stories and are worth celebrating on their special day, the third Saturday of  September annually.

Unlike the name and the diet of bamboo implies, red pandas are not related to giant pandas and were discovered fifty years earlier.

If you want a brief, but useful informative text about red pandas for young students and you do not have one in your school library this is a good start. And this on Kiddle. 

In our library we have:

• Red Pandas by Laura Marsh

• Red Pandas by Victoria Blakemore

Picture book stories that feature red pandas

• Pip and the Bamboo Path  by Jesse Hodgson

• Red Panda's Toffee Apples by Ruth Paul

• Hedgehog's Magic Tricks by Ruth Paul

• Rabbit's Hide-and-Seek by Ruth Paul

• Amy the Red Panda is Writing the Best Story in the World by Colleen Venable & Ruth Chan

Look out for Baby Red Pandas by Kate Riggs, one book in a new series for very young readers by a publisher who really knows how to do young nonfiction with spectacular photographs.

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

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#PandaDay

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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.