Celebrating Book Week 2014: Connect with Reading

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One world, many stories

DAY 25

My new $4 bargain store world globe, in preparation for Australian Children's Book Week 2011 and the theme, "One world, many stories". The globe is quite small; those books are miniatures. The shop also had smaller globes for $2 and a similar size in a different, sturdy base for $8.

Max sets sail

DAY 9

My latest eBay purchase just arrived on the front step. Max sets sail ("Where the wild things are") in a delightful Hallmark Christmas ornament, just in time for Midwinter Christmas - and Book Week. Sadly, this wild thing - a favourite from my own childhood - was missing from the recent live action film. I really expected him to at least make a cameo appearance.

BER - the first tour!

Yesterday, as I informed an outdoor assembly of the students of the results of the 2010 CBCA Awards for Book Week, work continued on our new BER (Building the Education Revolution) school library at my school. They are now starting to prepare the grounds for paths and covered walkways.

Last Thursday, I had my first tour through the site, and was able to get the inside scoop! It's really coming together in there!



These wooden boards are protecting the new glass double doors of the main entrance. Behind me, an external vestibule area - complete with a toilet (luxury!) and a staff/grade/"special programs" room - is taking shape. This meeting room has very generous storerooms, and will have a sink and an interactive whiteboard. We are getting this room because there was no way to use BER funding to overhaul the existing staffroom. Adding this area onto the library plan has given the building some character, especially when compared to the long, rickety tin box of a demountable library - which the school was so used to having around, for over two decades.



This will become the spacious library office and circulation areas.

An IWB (the second one in the building) shall be installed on the far wall, about where that ladder is standing.


I venture into my office for the first time!


Circulation, as viewed from the location of the library's IWB.


Yes, we will still have a second door for faster exits.

Down the other end of the school, a matching building, comprising a modern double classroom, with wet areas, storerooms and a glassed-in, shared withdrawal teaching space, is almost complete!

Hand-over of the new buildings may be only about six weeks away, but I'm not holding my breath. I know that many school libraries are ordering shelving and furniture at the same time and I guess some delays will be inevitable. But the new library is really coming. We can almost smell it!

Pop goes the displays!

Safari print balloons in our school library for Book Week. The theme this year is "Book Safari". I found these balloons earlier this year at a party shop in Melbourne, and was concerned that when the big week came I'd either forget all about them, or wouldn't be able to find them.

Catch up pics

Just back from Armidale, with my quota of images for my 365 Pictures project. We passed Tamworth's "Big Golden Guitar" on the way up to Armidale on the Thursday, but there wasn't time to stroll back to it and get a photo, hence the solitary, yellow bloom I found swaying in the breeze in the main street of Armidale in the afternoon.



Friday's pic features some bizarre signage at the host school of the teacher-librarians' conference I travelled up to attend. I realised, while lining up the shot, that the two circles seemed kinda reminiscent of female breasts. Or have I just heard too many lectures on visual literacy at this conference?



Finally, here's Alex the lion, a souvenir of Armidale. Alex the lion (voiced by Ben Stiller in the animated features, "Madagascar" and "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa") will grace the school library in time for the current Book Week theme, "Book Safari".

Beijing, books and bungee-jumping

This term, I'm working with at least seven very enthusiastic groups of Stage 2 students on the New South Wales Department of Education & Training's Beijing Olympic Games & Book Week 2008 rap.

Firstly, as with the other raps which ran this year, I’m promoting the rap blog URL in the school newsletter so that students can show off their group’s rap responses with their families each week.

In case the URL doesn’t make it home, I’m also explicitly modelling a search strategy (ie. how to use Google to find the rap pages) each time the students come for their blogging session. I show them what happens when we type in raps and book raps as search terms (almost 1.5 million hits!) and how the abundance of riches can be reduced by using inverted commas. (ie. “raps and book raps” gives only 5000 possible sites - and, in any case, the NSW DET Raps webpage appears as choice #1).

Also I demonstrate the pathway to get to the blog itself. For the last two raps, many students tried out visiting the rap blog from home, and we received great parental feedback.

Secondly, I brought in a collection of stuffed animal toy mascots (plus others that were already decorating the library). The Bruce Whatley drawing of Tammy the Tortoise (in the Children's Book Council of Australia shortlisted book, The Shaggy Gully Times) is uncannily like a toy tortoise I had at home, especially with the addition of a battery-operated pocket fan strapped to her back.

Now each group is selecting (and often naming) one of the animal “reporters”, who’ll represent them in the upcoming newspaper article rap point. Each one has his or her own “Press card” to get them into Olympic venues. The animal characters (a flying fox, the aforementioned tortoise, a Puffin Books puffin, a Chinese New Year dragon, a large green frog, Selby the taking dog, and my trusty big, black, furry, bungee spider - it's a long story) might prove useful for some f(p)unny photojournalism in the playground. We'll be able to upload the pictures to the Gallery of the rap blog - and they should provide inspiration for some typically Jackie French-esque animal puns.

Punctuation is a killer!

Book Week is fast approaching!

Yesterday, in the school library, I was discussing some of the CBCA shortlisted books with Stage 2 classes, and we turned our attention to Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie letter (Black Dog Books), which is edited by Carole Wilkinson.

Now, the Stage 3 students became very aware of the Kelly Gang last term, thanks to their "Gold!" unit in HSIE (Human Society & Its Environment), and our library focus on bushrangers. I wasn't expecting Stage 2 students to have much of an awareness about Ned.

A student in one class was asked what he knew about Ned Kelly the bushranger. I was fully expecting something to do with metal helmets, or robbing people, or maybe a connection to the late Heath Ledger (whose Ned Kelly movie was mentioned in recent obituaries for the Australian actor.)

"Ned Kelly had a lot of headaches. I saw him on the Nurofen ads on TV." (Sure enough, I saw the commercial myself last night! Nurofen's a prominent pain medication.)

I read Carole Wilkinson's introduction to Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie letter to another class and we discussed her mention of Ned's rambling style as he narrated the long letter to gang member, Joe Byrne, and how Wilkinson had to correct Byrne's spelling errors and missing punctuation.

"What is wrong with having no punctuation?" I asked.

"Full stops tell you when to take a breath," someone suggested.

"Is that how Ned Kelly killed people?" another student piped up.

Huh?

"Is that how he killed people? By making people read all those sentences without taking a breath?"

Making mentoring meaningful

Well, that was funny! Tonight was episode #1 of "The Librarians", a new Australian TV series on the ABC, in the timeslot recently held by the hilarious and pithy "Summer Heights High".

I happened to say to a few friends that I expected the series to be successful and funny, and probably rather close to the bone re my experiences in school libraries, studying with teacher-librarians at university, working at SCIS/Scan for the Department of Education & Training's State Office, and my connections with ALIA (the Australian Library & Information Association).

Yesterday and today, I was relieved at school (by another teacher-librarian) so I could act as mentor for a fellow teacher-librarian undergoing her training. Well, as if I'd read the script ahead of time, the plot of the first episode of "The Librarians" saw the main female character, frustrated Frances (Robyn Butler) dealing with Book Week, and being a mentor for the main hunky male character (played by Josh Lawson). When she should have had eyes for how he was coping with his librarian duties, she couldn't keep her eyes off his butt.

I'm rather glad the episode didn't air a day or two earlier - and probably the female colleague I was mentoring thinks so, too!

And hey! Not one "Trick or treater" knocked at my door this Halloween night. Drat. Now I have to eat all this candy all by myself.

Locked in. D'oh!

Last night was my regular trip into the city, to collect my weekly comics stash, but it was also a gathering of the Sydney Webloggers' Meetup Group. I was only able to stay briefly as, making a progressive dinner, it was off to Pancakes at the Rocks by 8pm to farewell our new Danish friend, Jonas, who joined our Star Trek Meetup Group while he was on a study scholarship to Sydney. He's heading off to the USA on the next leg of his study tour. Lucky guy.

I came home on a late-night country train, desperately trying not to fall asleep, lest I end up in Katoomba or Lithgow. I was pretty tired by the time I reached my front door (my housemate went off on vacation that morning) and I had a sudden realisation that losing my keys would be a Really Bad Idea. I was holding the school library keys in one hand while I unlocked the front screen door and then the main door. As I entered my house, I could feel the keys in my hand as I turned the locking clip of the wire door from the inside... and shut the main door. But the deadlock was still locked, meaning that my only copy of the house keys were now locked on the other side, and between the two doors.

Turning to face Jack, my dog, who was wearing his I-need-to-do-wee-wee, real bad face, I had to console him that we were now both trapped inside the house - and it was 11.30 pm. I realised it was too late to ring a neighbour, and even if I could escape through a window, how could I retrieve my door keys from behind the security grill of the screen door? I mean, security grills are made to be secure, unless you are holding the key.

It's probably not sensible to describe in exacting detail just how I managed to retrieve the keys - all by myself, and with no injuries - at 11.45pm, but at least I can now hire myself out as a successful cat burglar. It was a good feeling, I can assure you. I even fooled Jack, who went ballistic when he heard someone rattling the front door in desperation.

With only 15 minutes left to blog by midnight, I decided letting the dog out into the back yard, and having a strong drink, were higher priorities than blogging my latest goof-up. I should confess, it's not the first time I've locked my keys out of reach in this exact way. (This was time #2.) But at least that other time, my housemate was only about an hour away from arriving home from work with his keys.

I have lots of new books, comics and magazines to review, and I haven't really even gotten around to doing a report on my recent vacation. (I'm also having fun browsing all the bookshops I find, cherrypicking titles from the 2007 Shortlist, of the Children's Book Council of Australia Awards, which will be announced next Book Week. Thanks to the previous teacher-librarian, we already had most of the picture book titles.) So much to blog about and so little time.