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.

Curious Creatures Armadillos (Armadillo Day is the 13th August)

I have been contemplating talking to my students about armadillos because at the moment many of them think aardvarks and armadillos are interchangeable. This is not a major issue because we have neither of these animals in Australia and it is much more important that they know about animals such as echidnas, bandicoots and bilbies etc that live here, but as we are talking about 'curious creatures' and we have books that feature them I thought I would do a little bit of research.  Firstly I noticed that a new Jon Klassen book is about to hit the shelves next year and it has an armadillo in it. Here's the publisher's blurb for The Rock From the Sky

"Turtle really likes standing in his favorite spot. He likes it so much that he asks his friend Armadillo to come over and stand in it, too. But now that Armadillo is standing in that spot, he has a bad feeling about it . . . 

Here comes The Rock from the Sky, a hilarious meditation on the workings of friendship, fate, shared futuristic visions, and that funny feeling you get that there’s something off somewhere, but you just can’t put your finger on it. Merging broad visual suspense with wry wit, celebrated picture book creator Jon Klassen gives us a wholly original comedy for the ages."

Now this armadillo does not look particularly like the ones we have in other books, so all the more reason I need to find a photograph. All the species of armadillos can be found in the Americas. This website gives some good photos and some interesting facts.

Here's the books the library has:

             

• Armadillos by Kate Riggs

• Ape and Armadillo Take Over the World by James Sturm

• The Armadillo fom Amarillo by Lynne Cherry

• Willow the Armadillo by Marilou Reeder and Dave Mottram

• Arnie the Accidental Hero  by Joanne Partis

• Milo Armadillo by Jan Fearnley

• Armadillo Ray  by John Beifuss and Peggy Turley

• An Armadillo in Paris by Julie Kraulis

• Accident! by Andrea Tsurumi

• The Wishing Stone by Steve Smallman and Rebecca Elliott

• The Beginning of the Armadillos by Shoo Rayner 

and two series for chapter book reading young readers

• Hare and Armadillo  by Jeremy Strong

• Adventure Duck vs the Armadillo Army by Steve Cole

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.