Curious Creatures - the Aardvark and the Pangolin

While sharing Hello Hello  by Brian Wenzel with Year 1 classes we looked closely at the

animals on the endpapers and tried to name the animals we saw. There was much discussion of the aardvark. Most students thought it was an armadillo or an anteater so when we got the back of the book where it tells you what the animals are and how endangered they are we discovered that it was in fact an aardvark. The pangolin on the cover caused quite a frenzied discussion as well, so this week we shared Tenrec's Twigs by Bert Kitchen, watched a short BBC Attenborough film clip  on Madagascan animals and  thus looked in more detail at pangolins. This book allows students to empathise with the tenrec as he tries to solve his dilemma.

I went looking in the library for books which would allow further exploration and managed to find:

Pangolins:

• What in the World is a Pangolin? by Edward R. Ricciuti 

• Pangolins  by Victoria Blakemore

• Roly Poly Pangolin by Anna Dewdney

• Pinkie Mouse, Where Are You? by Alison Green and Deborah Allwright

Aardvarks:

• Aardvarks by Maddie Gibbs

• Aardvark or Anteater?  by Tamra Orr

• Awkward Aardvark by Mwalimu and Adrienne Kennaway

• Aalfred and Aalbert by Morag Hood

• It's an Orange Aardvark by Michael Hall

• Can an  Aardvark Bark? by Melissa Stewart and Steve Jenkins

• The Aardvark Who Wasn't Sure  by Jill Tomlinson

And just for fun AA is For Aardvark by by Mark Schulman, Aardvarks Disembark by Ann Jonas and Oi Aardvark! by Kes Gray and Jim Field which is coming soon.

Curious Creatures

 

As part of the theme 'Curious Creatures, Wild Minds' one of the displays in the library this week focussed on 'long necks'. We displayed books with animals who have long necks such as giraffes, alpacas, llamas, camels, ostriches, emus, and flamingoes together with some quiz questions to get the students talking. 

Among the books was Jo Bertini's A Man and his Camel. This is a very old picture book first published in 1996, but I have never quite brought myself to the point of withdrawing it from stock. Why? Well it fits into many themes; journeys, searches, home, deserts, camels, Tibet, Silk Road and endangered species and you are never quite sure when you'll be asked for a book. I picked it up to read while one of my Year 2 classes were doing some independent silent reading. Beside the Bactrian camel (the camel with two humps) there were other animals unknown to my students such as the musk deer, red panda, desman, otter, large mouse-eared bat, great bustard, sand gazelle, fenec fox, Crespi pelican, ibex, markhor, woolly flying squirrel and a jerboa. Yes, a multitude of curious creatures!

The man travelled from Pakistan, across the Himalayan Mountains into Kashmir, through Tibet to China, on to Mongolia,  Russia and the Volga River, on to Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, then to Israel and Egypt. From Alexandria around the Red Sea and into Saudi Arabia before going through Iraq to Iran. Next Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Samarkand, over the Kashgar Crossing, across the Pamir Mountains, down the Kunnjerab Pass and back into Pakistan. What a journey? Older students could plot this journey on a map!

The choice of vocabulary is also worth noting. There are verbs such as:  gazed; puzzled; shrugged; console; caution; dally; muster; sighed; chimed; fringe; lowed; bid; chortled; and thumped. There are descriptions:

- a melancholy reindeer whose antlers hung in sorrow-filled folds 

- floating on her back, leaf-like in the waves

- who is threading a trail to...

- in a whorl of winds and rufous feathers

- a querulous creature and prone to hysteria

- there across a mirage of woollen pyramids

- camel herd had gathered in conference

So much to explore and I haven't mentioned the illustrations. Jo Bertini is an Australian artist but unfortunately I cannot find any other picture books by her. If your library hasn't discarded it, have a look. It is full of curious creatures and Jo Bertini has a wild mind!

Curious Creatures

The book The Curious Ar-Chew is the perfect book to share with a young class while you are exploring the Book Week theme, Curious Creatures Wild Minds. 

 "Three woodland friends (a hedgehog, a goose and a rabbit) puzzle over the identity of a very strange creature asleep in the hollow of a tree. It has orange rubbery feet like a goose, long ears like a rabbit  and a thick woolly coat like a lamb. "  

I read it to my four Kindergarten classes this week and  the story certainly captured their interest and kept them guessing as to what the creature was. When the answer is revealed on the last page there was a loud sigh of  'oh yeh', as they put the clues together. We had talked the previous week about just what 'curious' meant and many remembered that it had two meanings. The hedgehog, the goose and the rabbit were curious to know what the creature in the hollow was. They thought it was 'curious' because it was 'strange' to them. Once the children knew that the creature was a child they then wanted to talk about whether she was curious or not. We made a list of things she could be curious about. With older children you could also discuss who has the wild mind in this story and get them to support their reasoning with evidence from the book.

This book is the debut picture book for New Zealand author Sarah Grundy. It won the Storylines Joy Cowley Award in 2016 for Sarah and the illustrators, husband and wife team Ali Teo and by John O'Reilly. If you do not have this book in your library, but you have a subscription to Story Box Library, you will find it there.

Read and Wonder

Early in my days as the teacher librarian of students between 4 and 8 years old I discovered  a series of books from Walker Books called Read and Wonder.  No other books in the non-fiction section of the library were like these! They were not like the traditional non-fiction books with photographs, contents pages, an index, headings and subheadings. They looked like story books because they had illustrations. They were written and illustrated by well known authors and illustrators. There were books by Vivian French, Martin Jenkins, Nicola Davies, Dick King Smith, Charlotte Voake and Karen Wallace to name but a few. I could 'sell' them to boys because they were information books and I could 'sell' them to girls because they looked like storybooks.

At a conference I picked up a great poster that was thin but very wide and it had the covers of the books on it. It was the perfectly to display and 'sell' the books to the students and their parents when they came into the library to borrow books. The poster has long since worn thin and become tatty, but Walker has kept adding to this wonderful series of books. Along the way there has been a name change to Nature Storybooks  and they have included authors and illustrators from Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

This term while my library is 'drowning' in curious creatures and my students are exploring all sorts of animals that they want to know more about, these books have once again 'walked out of the library'. A student who had just read Nick Dowson's Tigress  came to chat with me about the book and wanted another book 'just like that!' I love it when my job is 'this easy'.

If you don't know just how many of these wonderful books there are I have put the one that are to do with animals on this Pinterest page. Illustrated here is an animal from each of the five vertebrate groups!

24th July Curious Creatures

I have had a lot of fun reading one of my favourite books to my K to 2 library classes this week. I know Book Week has been postponed until Term 4, but I was keen to get started on displays and exploring the theme 'Curious Creatures Wild Minds'. I wanted to start a discussion of this theme using the bunyip, an Australian mythical creature.

I asked the students to draw a creature. They all drew an animal that they could attach a label to. No one drew anything imaginary, extinct, or an amalgam of many animals. When I said, "Is a creature an animal?" The answer was a unanimous, "Yes." "So are you a creature?" Some hesitation, but finally a yes.

Then I asked the students to look at the picture above. "Is this a creature?" "Why do you say that?"
I asked them to make a mental list of three things they could see in the picture. I scribed the long list and there were some very interesting things on the lists, including a mobile phone, lipstick and a magnifying glass. Next, I asked them for one question they would like to ask this creature. There was the obvious like, "What are you?"; "What are you holding?"; "Who are you?" and  "Where do you live?" but there was also ones like, "Do you have friends?" ; "Why do you only have three toes?" and  "What is on your head?".

Lastly, I asked,  "Is this creature curious?" "What makes you say that?" This lead to a discussion of what the word 'curious' meant and after finding out that there are two meanings and that the second meaning is 'strange or unusual' there seemed to be consensus that it was a curious creature.

I then showed the students the cover of the book, The Bunyip of Berkley's Creek by Jenny Wagner and Ron Brooks, the book that won Picture Book of the Year in 1974, forty six years ago. They now knew what the character was, and many students then had anecdotes that they wished to share.

I read the story, slowly and quietly. The first page sets the mysterious tone beautifully. You could hear a pin drop while I read, so few children knew the book. I stopped only once to discuss and explain the sign which has the long words, 'Environment Preservation' and 'Trespassers Prosecuted'.

After reading, in pairs students discussed what they liked about the story and Year 2 pairs also devised a definition of a bunyip eg A bunyip is ... We listened to each others definitions and then amalgamated the pertinent bits to get something like this...
A bunyip is a large mythical creature which lurks (hangs around) in creeks, billabongs,              swamps and waterholes.

The Year 2 students had decided that bunyips weren't real, but wanted to know more, so we looked for other books in the library with bunyips and on Kiddle which they had used last term. We found these books:
1. What's a Bunyip?  by Nette Hilton and Roland Harvey. 
2. Bunyips Don't !  by Sally Odgers and Kim Gamble.
3. Emily and the Big Bad Bunyip by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley.

The students thought that Harvey, Gamble and Whatley had all seen Ron Brooks' bunyip, because they too had drawn the bunyip with a tail, floppy ears, a very rounded body and it didn't look overly scary.




If you choose to do this, do not show the students the Kiddle entry before you read the books, because it will give them a different view of bunyips from the one Jenny Wagner intended. It is for further exploration for the students who want to read up on Australian folklore or Aboriginal mythology.

Later I found three more books:
• Out of Nowhere by Tricia Oktober
• Rosie and the Bunyip  by Meredith Costain, and 
• The Butti Butti Bunyip by Dianne Bates

If there had been time we could have looked at and compared the four bunyip illustrations that appeared on Australian stamps in 1994, one of which was Ron Brooks' Berkley Creek one.


Well we ran out of time, but all the bunyip books were borrowed, some students went off to explore the Indigenous Book Bins and others took from all the unusual animal books that we had on display!

PS. Jenny Wagner seems to 'like' curious creatures! Her novel The Nimbin is also about an endearing curious creature. It is perfect for primary classes.

Curious Creatures, Wild Minds

When the CBCA announced this slogan for Book Week I did wonder how I was going to explain it to and enthuse my under eight year old audience in the library. 'Curious' is a word I use with them quite often and I know that they like to use that word. It is good that it has two meanings.

1. eager to know or learn something  & 2. strange or unusual     
Then if we add 

synonyms: for 1. inquisitive: intrigued; interested

for 2: odd; peculiar; unusual; bizarre; weird; eccentric    

We then have quite a lot to work with. I have had fun collecting books to put together a display. I added the 'wild' from wild minds to make half of the display to be a collection of books that explore unusual wild animals. I started with questions like

• What is an okapi?

• What is an axolotl?

• What is a pangolin?

• What is a tenrec?

• What is uakari?

• What is an ibex?

• What is an aye-aye?

• What is a wonga-wonga?

and then I realised there are so many animals I could add to this list. Just look in books such as 

• Weird and Wonderful Animals  by Rosella Trionfetti and Cristina Banfi

• The World of Weird Animals Series  by Jess Keating

         Pink is for Blobfish

         Cute as an Axolotl

         Gross as a Snot Otter

         What Makes a Monster?

• Who are You Calling Weird?  by Marilyn Singer and Paul Davis  

• Weird Animals  by Mary Kay Carson

• Lesser Spotted Animals by Martin Brown

• Even More Lesser Spotted Animals by Martin Brown

• Who Am I? by Steve Jenkins

• Tenrec's Twigs  by Bert Kitchen

And for those very mixed up animals, read:                                

• Hello Hello  by Brendan Wenzel

• The Wild Fluffalump by Mwenye Hadithi

• Greedy Zebra by Mwenye Hadithi

• Call Me Gorgeous  by Giles and Alexandra Milton

See more on Pinterest here.

23rd June Typewriter Day

June 23, the anniversary of the granting of a patent to American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes in 1868 is celebrated around the world as Typewriter Day. So, take out your old typewriter from the attic, dust it and get started on your magnum opus! Bring out a typewriter and start typing.



Yesterday I just happened to be sharing Tom McLaughlin's picture book, The Story Machine with some Kindergarten classes. We had a great discussion about typewriters. Some of the children were keen to explain that their grandparents had one and they were allowed to use it. This fascinated the children who'd never seen one. This got me thinking about other books that featured a typewriter and I could only think of Mini Grey's Hermelin: the Detective Mouse  and Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type  by Doreen Cronin. There must be others. Now I'll be on a mission when I'm reading and shelving.

Then this morning when I started my search I found out that there was a day to celebrate typewriters and it is very soon, the 23rd June!

I have found two more picture books that look as if they would be worth exploring, but we don't have them in our library.
• The Typewriter  by Bill Thomson. We have his other books, Fossil  and Chalk which are well-borrowed so I will get this one. And I love the cover of this with its smiling typewriter
• Typewriter by Yevgenia Nayberg, but it's price will exclude a sight-unseen purchase.

If you don't have The Story Machine  there is a video of Tom McLaughlin reading it here.

I had been exploring author/ illustrators reading their own books during the home-learning period to encourage my students to make their own books and the CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education in the UK) has many fine examples.