8th May One Warm Coat Day

While thinking about jumpers, I also wondered about jackets and coats and whether they had days of their own. There is a day to celebrate leather jackets on 14th July. There appears to have been a National Coat Day on the 20th June, but why would Americans need to wear a coat in June? Then there's One Warm Coat Day on October 6th.  One Warm Coat Day is run by a not-for-profit charity in the United States that works to provide a free, warm coat to any person in need and to raise awareness of the vital need for warm coats.

One Warm Coat’s mission is to provide free coats to children and adults in need while promoting volunteerism and environmental sustainability. Thirty years ago, one woman with one coat sparked a movement that has led to over 43,000 coat drives across the United States, providing more than 7.3 million free, warm coats to children and adults while keeping more than 18 million pounds of textiles out of landfills. One Warm Coat believes in each person’s right to shelter from the elements and is committed to sharing warmth one coat at a time. 

This is a fantastic initiative. In many parts of Australia many of us only don a coat if we are going to Tasmania, Melbourne, the snow or the mountains or are off overseas, as it is rarely very cold.

Are coats common in children's books? 

• There are many beautiful editions of the bible story about Joseph and his coat of many colours. See:

Joseph's Coat of Many Colours by Katherine Sully

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice and Quentin Blake

Joseph by Anna Fienberg and Kim Gamble

The Coat of Many Colours by Pauline Baynes and Jenny Koralek

• A coat features in the fable about the wind and the sun. See

The Contest Between the Sun and the Wind by Heather Forest and Susan Gabor

The North Wind and the Sun by Brian Wildsmith

• A coat features in this Turkish folktale, The Hungry Coat by Demi. It features Nasrettin Hoca, a version of Nasreddin Hoca who was a philosopher, wise, witty man with a good sense of humour. His stories have been told almost everywhere in the world, spread among the tribes of Turkic World and into Persia, Arabia, Africa and along the Silk Road to the China and India cultures.

• Other fiction picture books which feature a coat.

Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Taback Simms

Blurb: When Joseph's coat got too old and shabby, he made it into a jacket. But what did he make it into after that? And after that?

The Goat's Coat  by Tom Percival and Christine Pym 

Blurb: When Alfonzo the goat discovers a host of creatures who need help, he doesn't hesitate. Using his precious, much-loved coat, he finds ways to solve their problems - fashioning a boat for frogs out of a cuff, for instance. But soon he's down to the last thread and it's started to snow... What will he do?

The Coat by Julie Hunt and Ron Brooks

Blurb: The Coat stood in a paddock at the end of a row of strawberries. It was buttoned up tight and stuffed full of straw and it was angry. 'What a waste of me!' it yelled. Then along came a man. 'I could do with a coat like that,' the man said. 

The Pocket Dogs by Margaret Wild and Stephen Michael King

Blurb: Mr Pockets' two small dogs, Biff and Buff, love to ride in his big coat pockets. But one day a hole appears in the right pocket and it gets bigger...

The Jacket by Sue-Ellen Pashley and Thea Baker

Blurb: about a much loved colourful coat that is passed from Amelia to Lily, to Lilly’s dolls, the cat with her kittens and finally breathed new life in to once more as the worlds most fabulous teddy bear for Lilly’s younger brother. 

A Coat of Cats by Jeri Kroll and Ann James

Blurb: When an old woman is moved to a "shiny new apartment," she is forced to leave her seven cats behind. But cats have long memories, as well as nine lives, and they miss her as much as she misses them. Late one night, the old woman braves freezing weather to check on her cats, and discovers that she means as much to them as they mean to her. 

The Tiny Woman's Coat by Joy Cowley and Giselle Clarkson

Blurb:The tiny woman makes a coat of leaves with the help of her animal friends. The trees, geese, porcupine, horse and plants all share something so the tiny woman can snip, snip, snip and stitch, stitch, stitch a coat to keep herself warm.

A Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton and Brooke Boynton Hughes

Blurb:  Using lyrics from her classic song "Coat of Many Colors," the book tells the story of a young girl in need of a warm winter coat. When her mother sews her a coat made of rags, the girl is mocked by classmates for being poor. But Parton's trademark positivity carries through to the end as the girl realizes that her coat was made with love "in every stitch." 

The Coat by Severine Vidal and Louis Thomas 

Blurb: Ah, the coat. So warm, so beautiful, so red. It's all Elise has really wanted, and she's been waiting forever. Lighthearted and poignant, this book offers a glimpse at the hardships confronting those who are experiencing homelessness and inspires us to treat them with compassion and respect.

The Bird Coat by  Inger Marie Kjolstadmyr and Oyvind Torseter

Blurb: The tailor Pierre has a big dream: He wants to fly. To make this outlandish vision a reality, he decides to sew a garment that is up to the task: his very own, resplendent bird coat. This tale was inspired by the true story of Franz Reichelt, dubbed "the flying tailor," who in 1912 jumped from the Eiffel Tower in an attempt at flight.

Beware the Killer Coat  by Susan Gates ( a short novel that is out of print but may be in a library) *

Blurb: Andrew hates his jumble-sale coat from the moment he first sets eyes on it. Big, red and shiny, with sharp, teeth-like zips and flaps that look like nasty green eyes, the coat clings to Andrew like an octopus. This is no ordinary coat, he is sure; it's a killer coat that wants to hurt him. The problem is that his mother won't take his worries seriously.

While making this list, I was surprised to see just how many of them are about recycled coats or the repurposing of coats, perfect for teaching about sustainability and over consumption.

7th May Jumper Weather

Sweater Day is on February 4, because in America, people are getting ready to snuggle into their warmest sweaters in the depth of winter. The World Wildlife Fund (W.W.F.) established Sweater Day and advocates it every year. The circle of life means human depletion of natural resources negatively impacts animal wellbeing and their habitats. Consumption of fuel pollutes the environment and water, endangering the lives of animals. Changing our little habits can make a difference.

I'm not sure we have an equivalent, like Jumper Day in Australia, but as I walked this week in Orange with my sister and today, with a friend in Sydney, it most definitely was a jumper or sweater day! A couple of weeks ago we were basking in warm sunshine sans jumper.

Why so many names for what is a  type of knitted garment that is worn over the upper body? Americans call them 'sweaters'. As you might have guessed, sweater comes from sweat—the earliest sweaters were worn by rowers, and were intended "to produce sweating and reduce weight."

Australians and Brits call them 'jumpers'. The word is derived from an old French word, “jupe" which was a type of short coat. At some point in time the word in English became “jump" and then eventually “jumper".

Of course there are other names for various versions of overgarment designed to keep us warm. There is jersey, cardigan, sloppy joe ...

Sadly there is no gazetted Jumper Day. There is however a Christmas Jumper Day in Britain on 8th December, once again in the Northern Hemisphere's winter. It was instigated by the Save the Children Fund in 2012 to raise money.

At school during Autumn it is fun to watch the leaves on the trees outside the library windows change colour. We often do a display of Autumn books and as it gets colder and the trees are bare we begin to think about a display linked to knitting and making things indoors.

There are some good 'jumper' picture books that I have enjoyed reading.

Look for:

• Jack's Jumper by Sara Acton

• The Huey's in the New Jumper by Oliver Jeffers

• Where's My Jumper  by Nicola Slater    

• Sheep to Jumper by Fiona MacDonald

• The Bush Jumper by Jean Chapman and Ali Beck

• The Best Jumper by Lynne Garner

• Little Bear's Big Jumper by David Bedford and Caroline Pedler

• Extra Yarn  by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen 

• Otto Goes North  by Ulrika Kestere

• Unravelled by Leanne Hatch

• Woolly Jumper: The Story of Wool by Meredith Hooper

• Brrr! Where Did the Dinosaurs Really Go? by Kes Gray and Nick East

• Lester's Dreadful Sweaters  by K.G. Campbell

• Squirrel's Sweater  by Laura Renauld

• Sweater Weather by Matt Phelan

• From Sheep to Sweater  by Robin Nelson

My two favourites to read aloud to preschool classes:

And the newest:

There's a fun activity for this book on Sara's webpage.

And if you want to read about penguins wearing jumpers , not because they're cold but rather affected by an oil spill, read these:

• Flipper and Finnegan : the true story of how tiny jumpers saved little penguins  by Sophie Cunningham and Anil Tortop

• Penguins Don't Wear Sweaters by Marrika Tamura and Daniel Rieley

7th to 13th May Amphibian Week

Amphibians are unique. They begin their lives in the water, but most of their adult life is on land. And they are ectothermic, meaning their body temperature relies on external sources, like a rock heated by the sun or a river or lake. Amphibians are sensitive to invasive species, drought, disease, and other changes where they live. So researchers study amphibians because they often show early signs of stressors, like disease and climate change.

Jodi Rowley, from the Australian Museum who was named in The Australian’s Research 2023 magazine as research field leader in zoology, says that amphibians are one of the least understood and most endangered groups of animals on the planet. She notes that, according to the authoritative IUCN Red List, 41 per cent of amphibian species worldwide are threatened with extinction.

Year 2 at my school classify animals into their groups as part of a Unit of Inquiry they are undertaking. The students don't always find this easy as they don't necessarily know a lot about animals beyond their generic name. As they learn more they become fascinated by amphibians, partly because they have no knowledge of any, other than frogs and they really like that they can live in water and on land.

One year while they were doing this unit, in the library we embarked on learning more about salamanders. We started with Minton,  a well-loved series of books about a salamander called Minton which started with The Hottest Boy by Anna Fienberg and Kim Gamble. The students did not know what a salamander was and were curious. There are no salamanders and newts native to Australia, so it wasn't that easy finding nonfiction books at their level to research further.

We found three:

• Salamanders  by Nick Winnick

• Fun Facts About Salamanders  by Carmen Bredeson

• Lifecycle of Salamander by Robin Nelson

There is some fiction as well:

• The Salamander Room  by

• Spike  by Michelle Knudsen

• The Fiery Salamander  by Colin Thiele

Look here for books about the more popular amphibians, frogs and toads.

Of course frogs, toads, salamanders and newts will feature in any book that is specifically about amphibians. See my Pinterest page on Animal Classification for suggestions.

If your students are young, these are perfect:

• Amphibians Living Things and their Habitats  by Grace Jones

• Amphibians Live on Land and in Water by Sarah Ridley

• Do You Know About Amphibians? by Buffy Silverman

• Amphibians  by Angela Royston

Foot note: The Smooth Newt has been introduced to Australia near Melbourne and has started to spread. This probably occurred because a pet salamander escaped or was dumped.

4th May Firefighters Day

International Firefighters’ Day is observed each year on 4th May. On this date you are invited to remember the past firefighters who have died while serving our community or dedicated their lives to protecting the safety of us all. At the same time, we can show our support and appreciation to the firefighters world wide who continue to protect us so well throughout the year.

Young children are fascinated by fire engines, the noise they make and the fire station they live in. Preschoolers go on excursions to the fire station. Young students sit very attentively when fire fighters visit their school.

Whenever I need a quick lesson where students can innovate on text, learn about verbs and titles I turn to that versatile poem Fire! Fire! Cried Mrs McGuire. It is also a great provocation for any discussion about fire, and firefighters.

Here's the poem in picture book form, but it is in many poetry anthologies too. 

Any library display devoted to firefighters is quickly decimated. Here's some books that are specifically about firefighters:

Newer books that are for slightly older audiences and that treat fire where you may get a different view of firefighting very differently are:

24th April Children are forgetting the joy of reading books

As children and teachers go back to school this week in New South Wales, tucked away on page 18 of the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, there was a 'news' article that was headed 'Children are forgetting the joy of reading'. It was written by journalist, Catherine Naylor and on further reading of the article it implied that this was because of children spending time on screens. It is far more than this!

Firstly, children are not forgetting the joy of reading. Many of them haven't yet got that joy to forget. While I have been teaching the English syllabus has had many iterations and it is in the process of being changed yet again. The K to 2 section is now mandatory. The changes overly stress phonics as the first essential of reading. While phonics certainly is important, the first elements of reading that should be stressed are JOY and PURPOSE. Why do we read? Why do I need to read? Successful students read and they read for pleasure.

I teach in a K to 12 school and I get great pleasure reading the Year 12 results when I see that a student who has done well is a student that I taught and she or he was experiencing joy in reading in Prep School. I know then that I had a role in that student's education. I love it when they or their mum or dad tells me about them as a reader and the impact it has had on them. This happened to me recently at a school student get together in a pub.

While I am prepared to admit that many teachers need help with how to teach reading, they also need more than the mechanics. They need knowledge of children's literature, they need to be readers themselves and they need to know how to make reading fun. Yes, the fun has gone out of reading. When I see a smart board screen with one letter (sound) in the middle of it and students articulating that sound over and over, I do wonder if they know why they are doing that.

While walking this week with a teacher colleague, she was bemoaning the fact that a lot of the theatre had gone from teaching. She said 'to me teaching is a performance' and when I watch  and listen to some of my fellow teachers I think that there is a mundaneness about their teaching. And yes, that may be because they have too much on their plate, but I also think that it is because they no longer 'own' what they teach. It is fine to be given units of work to follow, but to teach something verbatim means that it s not yours. 

NESA has provided teachers with sample units of work in the new English syllabus which are supposed to ensure that they cover all elements and outcomes of the syllabus. But many schools are adhering to them as if they are the panacea to English education. They are written by teachers so they have flaws and play favourites just like all teachers do. Who says that the books suggested in these units are the only books or the best books that you should or could use to teach that outcome at that stage level? These units fragment the curriculum and make the day even busier than it already is and many students are failing to transfer these skills across curriculum areas. Be brave choose your own texts and relate them to your unit of inquiry or some other area of the curriculum. Show your students why and how this can be done.

Secondly, if it was as simple as saying that the joy has gone because of screens, then all of the teacher librarians who have done their best to promote e-reading and have provided a myriad of book titles that students have access to via screen would be saying that students can get the joy of reading from a screen. Many of my adult reading friends do read on screen, but that is not where they got their initial joy of reading from. They got it from their parents, another family member,  a teacher, a teacher librarian, a peer, in other words another enthusiastic reader who loves reading and books!

The school library I work in, has always loaned books to parents. This is because we see teaching reading as being a partnership between home and school in the early years of schooling. We encourage parents to supplement their child's choices with things that they may not choose to borrow themselves. We work hard at ensuring the books on display change regularly. We organise displays by genre, theme, author, illustrator, world events, school events, International Days and sometimes even by something as simple as a colour, word or letter. When we have a display based on a word or a letter, the students have great pleasure in telling me why those books are a group... all these book tiles have e.g. the word 'why' or the word 'no', all these titles are about things that start with 'p'. The students know that I am asking them to engage with reading.

We also endeavour to get teachers into the library. Of course we have our diehard borrowers, but it is hard to get some teachers to even walk through the door of the library. We have tried giving them book bags each week. We have left books on their chair. We have advertised books at staff meetings. We have gone above and beyond with bulk loans for their classrooms, but if the enthusiasm isn't there and time isn't made for reading 'real' books as opposed to 'readers' the joy of reading will not be 'caught'.

Unfortunately, some teachers and curriculum co-ordinators have interpreted the new curriculum to mean that it is not necessary to read whole texts, an extract will suffice, and that sustained silent reading (SSR or DEAR) is not necessary, or actually is a waste of time until a student can read. These teachers are missing two things in their teaching repertoire... JOY and STAMINA. If they read to their students, then their students want to read (look) at those books themselves. They want to peruse the finer details in the illustrations. They want to peruse the layout, the font, the things that make that book special.

Stamina is also learned. Students need to be able to sit, focus and be with a book for extended periods of time. Many students I teach love being read to, and they can sustain being read to for long periods of time but when they are reading to themselves they run out of stamina to do it for a lengthy time. They start to fidget, skip forward in the book, ask to go to the toilet, want to swap books etc. Yes, this may be because they cannot read what they chose, but it could also be that they have not had opportunities to do this. If the teacher starts small, uses a timer and makes it a game, each day the period of time can become a little bit longer until students can entertain themselves with a book rather than a screen. Use wordless books (see Pinterest) where the student has to make up the story themselves. Use books you have already read to them or old favourites they know and can 'read' themselves.

Catherine Naylor says that "the portion of children aged 5 to 14 who read in their spare time has fallen by more than six percentage points in just four years, from 78.5 per cent to 72.4per cent." I think that is most probably because of COVID when students did get very used to using screens and had less access to books from school, but watching students in my library over the last ten years or so, students certainly look for shorter books and books that are funny. Why? Well it goes back to stamina, but it is also what they are exposed to. Pulp fiction in the supermarkets is short and funny and cheap. Teachers and parents have to expose them to more and that is why the provision of extended JOY goes back to parents and teachers. Some students are reading, but I think they could be enjoying reading a wider range of books.

The students at my school are very lucky. The libraries are very well stocked and their is a great range to choose from, but not every school or classroom has this and if the curriculum says 'literature' is important, it should be more specific about the role of the school library, the classroom library and the teacher modelling reading. Every teacher needs to read Megan Dowd Lambert's book, Reading Picture Books With Children so that they know what they are modelling. The curriculum shouldn't be interpreted to mean every teacher librarian has to buy multiple copies of the books that are used in the sample units and deplete their meagre budget for other books that might excite students. Let teacher librarians do what they should be doing, enthusing students, teachers and parents to read for pleasure.

On that note, I have watched what's happening in the UK very closely. They went down the track of a much more didactic curriculum and closing of school libraries and now years later there is a big push for 'reading for pleasure' in schools and the online groups of teachers asking for help with that are immense.

I have just noticed that my friend at Momo Celebrating Time to Read has also written about this newspaper article, so read what she has to say as well. She certainly has a PASSION for reading and children's books and I do know that not every teacher will be like her and me, but there does need to be a lot more passion associated with the teaching of literacy. We want children not only to be able to read, but who also choose to read long after your interaction with them.

It is a sad indictment when you read the blurb for this wonderful book:

Now consider: When talking with children about their reading lives at school, are you likely to hear about this transformative reading joy? Or are you more likely to hear about reading logs, book reports, and standardised tests? For too many young readers, reading is joyless. It is something that is required of them, but not something that they choose to do.