A meeting of the Supermen? PRC 2010

Only a few days after hanging up the framed Premier's Reading Challenge poster of our students in our new BER school library (our students were selected this year's Challenge "poster kids", below), and opening the library to its first timetabled week of visitors, I was off to represent us at the annual reception. This year, the PRC celebrated another successful year at the Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour.



My official job this year was to be the minder for football heroes, Mario Fenech and Hazem El Masri (that's Hazem in the background of the first pic, behind those two handsome superheroes). Mario and Hazem had a great rapport with the students attending the event, and slipped in plenty of references to the value of reading, as each group wound its way through short, meet 'n' greet activities - with a host of popular children's authors and illustrators, including Duncan Ball with Selby the Talking Dog (who stayed mute), and Kim Gamble sketching yet another "Tashi" masterpiece as we watched, gobsmacked.


Kim Gamble draws "Tashi".

Snow White was also there, making balloon animals, and there was a very gregarious Superman, who, at the event's close, did additional duties - as Selby's minder and Grug's wrangler!

Yes, Grug is back! Remember that shaggy caveman creature from the 1980s, in Ted Prior's hugely popular little picture books? Well, Grug is back in print, and many of the younger students found their own little stuffed Grug in their goody bags (look out for them in bookstores this Christmas!) Several of the adults noticed, just before the Premier's car was due, that a huge blue vinyl bag had arrived in the foyer. Normally, such an occurrence may have caused a security alert, but we were abuzz with "It's Grug! Grug's in that bag! What else is that shape like that? That'll be Grug!" (Well, we had noticed his name on the guest list, which helped immensely.)


Grug arrives undercover!


Grug unleased!


Selby unleashed!


Premier of NSW, Kristina Keneally, spoke passionately about the joy of reading, and the many rewards that books can bring.


Children's author Andrew Daddo sums up. Boori "Monty" Pryor is in front of me!


Superman is asked to round up the overheated Grug and Selby.




Grug has left the building!

Getting postered

Penrith Public School students feature in the 2010 poster
promoting the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge.

Premier's Reading Challenge vs Premier's Leadership Challenge

This is the spectacular view from Government House, Sydney, venue of the annual Premier's Reading Challenge presentation - with an absent Premier, who was fighting a losing battle to save his own job.


















The next door neighbour is some weird, white, noisy building! ;)

Reading with Rees, and on the mark

I was up and out of the house before 7.00am this morning, and did a detour past school, to drop off messages for my casual teacher replacement, so I could attend the Premier's Reading Challenge presentation ceremony, an annual event.

This year, a new venue, Riverside Theatres at Parramatta, and a new Premier of NSW, Nathan Rees. Once again, we had glorious weather, and the lucky groups of students who were invited to attend had a great time rotating around various activity stands, meeting lots of Australian authors and the newly announced PRC "ambassadors".

They tried something a bit different this year. Nathan Rees participated in a reading of a rollicking poem from Norman Lindsay's "The magic pudding", and Peter FitzSimons led a short panel discussion about favourite books. The student participants were so eloquent.

I was assigned to be minder/chaperone for author Frances Watts - a huge honour, since I'm a great admirer of the book she did with illustrator, David Legge: "Parsley Rabbit's book about books". Between denials to hopeful school students, many of whom assumed that I was David Legge (who at home trying to meet a deadline on their third book together), I was able to swap anecdotes with Frances about how her book is used in schools. She mentioned that many years of observing teacher-librarians introduce new books gave her the inspiration for the book.

What a coincidence that I wore my black and silver Superman jacket today; Frances was giving out bookmarks for her book, "Extraordinary Ernie & Marvellous Maud", the story of two unlikely young superheroes. And, yes, the bookmark even has its own secret identity! Flip it over and make your own superhero domino mask!

Premier premiere

With the closing date of the Premier's Reading Challenge passing this week, and my recent attendance at Keating, the musical celebration of one of Australia's big political switcheroos, it was a surprise to hear the evening news tonight and realise it had happened again.

All change!

The radio this morning noted that NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, would be reshuffling his cabinet and choosing a new Deputy. Instead, Iemma realised he'd lost the support of his caucus faction - and relative newcomer, Nathan Rees, was suddenly Premier in his stead.

So there'll be a different signature on this year's Premier's Reading Challenge certificates!

Read, read, read...

Yay! Right up to the wire, I was concerned that my students hadn't achieved a better result in the Premier's Reading Challenge than last year, but suddenly the results were finalised and we had sixteen more students (ie. 329 out of 410) than in 2007. (So we've gone from two students in 2005, to 209, then 313 and now 329.) One of our students earns their Gold Certificate this year; our school's first.

Less Stage 3 (Years 5 and 6) than I'd have liked but more students total is better than less. The Stage 3 students do have to read fifteen books from a prepared list of recommended titles, plus five books of their own choosing. Since there is a considerable number of picture books on "the list", it means that even students not willing to commit to novels can achieve results. (The younger students have it comparably easier: 30 books, mainly picture books, that must be read to them. Most of the class teachers found that, after a year, they'd read at least 60 or so of the listed titles.

I shall have to make a concerted effort next year with those students who've managed to avoid participating in the Challenge. The enthusiastic readers will read with, or without, the annual PRC. It's the ones who need a bit of a shove who still need... a bit of a shove.

NSW Premier's Typing Challenge

Where have I been?

Well, on September 1, it is the closing date of the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge for school students and, since I've apparently done too good a job promoting the Challenge to the 400+ students I teach, I have lots of last-minute reading records to upload to the PRC website.

The organisers had been having a bit of trouble working some bugs out of their new system, so I gave the site as much time to recover as I dared, to make sure that when I did start entering data I didn't lose anything. To their credit, the organisers have made the site accessible to the students, under their own user names and passwords, this year. Our school doesn't have sufficient free computers (as in, our computers are constantly in use by classes) and of sufficient download speed, to make this an equitable shortcut, or much of a time/motion saving.

Therefore, I've been doing the data entry myself - but my clerical assistant took pity on me and spent many more interludes than her allotted library time to ease my burden. So far we are only a few off reaching last year's record of 313 completed Challenge booklets!

So here I am on the last Saturday, still cross referencing names manually with class lists to ensure I haven't missed anyone - and I note that we now also have all day Monday to keep entering data if necessary! Whew! I do have a few queries and now I have a reprieve, and can chase up missing student records on Monday.

In fact, I shall reward myself to lunch and a movie tomorrow! I'm off to meet up with my old friend, Andrew Mercado (producer of the upcoming, eagerly-awaited "Number 96" DVD boxed set) to see the documentary "Not Quite Hollywood" at Fox Studios Australia. It's the story of Australian so-called sexploitation films, including... "Number 96".

Taronga bound!

When you leave the house at 6.00am (and not required to be at Taronga Park Zoo until 10.00am), it's very hard to guess what to wear. I took a chance that it was going to be hot, so I chose shorts (but good ones, because I was to be in the presence of the New South Wales Premier, Morris Iemma), a shirt with a collar and my leather bush hat, but made sure to take my umbrella. It was just as likely to have been torrential rain all day. I did feel a little silly heading off in a hat, shorts and comfortable shoes at 6.00am, but it did turn out to be a glorious hat day: a trip on a ferry, and then overlooking Sydney Harbour from the Free-Flight Bird Show open-air amphitheatre at the Zoo.

The occasion was the annual Premier's Reading Challenge presentation ceremony. I was invited as a member of the booklist review committee, but my Very Important Task today (pic, above right) was to chaperone children's author Duncan Ball (ie. a close friend of Selby, the talking dog). In fact, during the sit-down proceedings I got to be right near artist Kim Gamble (who drew an amazing picture from the forthcoming "Tashi and the Phoenix" in pastels which they raffled off to one of the invited school groups) and authors and/or illustrators such as Anna Fienberg, Emily Rodda (aka Jennifer Rowe), Tohby Riddle, Ursula Dubosarsky and Libby Gleeson, to name just a few. Several of the teachers exclaimed that Gordon Winch, also present, had been their lecturer at university but for me, it was Barbara Poston-Anderson, also present and who'd arrived with Gordon, who had been my lecturer of teacher-librarianship.

Every person who spoke at the formal part of the ceremony did it with such enthusiasm, it was easy to be swept away by the positiveness of this celebration of literary achievements. Because of the PRC, over eight million books have been read by NSW students (that otherwise may not have been).

Celebrating literacy

On Thursday, the community at the primary school where I'm teacher-librarian, enjoyed a glorious spring afternoon celebrating literacy with a multicultural reading picnic. Thematic reading picnics have become a popular tradition at our school. An initiative of our Priority Schools Program (PSP) Committee, these picnics have become an excellent way for the all of us - parents, caregivers, students and staff - to focus on the importance of improving literacy skills and attitudes to reading.

The students arrived at school in multicultural costumes, or dressed in the colours of the national flag of their family’s country of origin. During the day, I presented each class with a certificate acknowledging their participation in the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge for 2007. This year, 313 of the school’s 400 students successfully completed this state-wide Challenge, up from 209 students in 2006. (A lot of independent reading has been achieved, and the students’ confidence in reading for pleasure has soared; it is great to see such enthusiasm for books.)



After lunch, the students and their visitors gathered in the main playground for a presentation of the folk tale, “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. Our English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher assisted a group of her students to deliver alternating segments of this familiar story in a range of home languages and English. Languages represented included Croatian, Mandarin, Korean, Shona (a language of Zimbabwe), Tongan, Hindi and Farsi (a language of Afghanistan and Iran).

A multicultural trivia competition, organised by another teacher, had also been running in the days leading up to the picnic. There was also a display of multicultural picture books from the library and book reviews written by Stage 3 students (which are soon to be published by the Penrith Star).

Picnic baskets of goodies and favourite books in hand, it was then time for buddy classes and family groups to move off to various grassed areas around the school – each location was named after a different continent – for an afternoon of shared reading. It was very exciting to see all the groups on their picnic rugs so engrossed in their books.

And, today, the Sun-Herald newspaper (page 44) featured a photograph of some of our students at the picnic and quoted me in the accompanying article:
The children's picnics were centred on the joy that came from "literacy and reading, and... the fact that you can read a book anywhere. We're always looking for informal ways to get the parents up and to get them focused on literacy."

The article was titled, "Move over, teddy, this picnic's for bookworms".


How to try to top the amazing multicultural costumes worn by the students and parents? Go intergalactic! My screen-used Tellarite ambassador's costume from "Star Trek: Enterprise" gets its (Australian) debut on home soil. The trousers came with the costume, but how about those Ugg boots, eh? My Westie contribution to the ensemble.




It was a very hot afternoon, but the two layers of costume were surprisingly tolerable. I didn't wear the third layer, of course: the official Paramount Tellarite fat-suit! In fact, I thought maybe my result for Sunday's magic number would have been much better than 93.3 (sigh!) but it has been a week of many little celebrations and indulgences, such as: the staff dinner after Tuesday night's student disco; a thank you pavlova on Wednesday; the reading picnic on Thursday; a staff dinner at King Henry's Court restaurant on the Thursday night; a staff breakfast at McDonald's on Friday morning; end-of-term drinks on the Friday afternoon; and dining out with friends on Saturday night. What's really frustrating is that I feel skinnier. Well, they say that muscle weighs more than fat - and I have been walking a lot this week...

This cold makes me feel funny

Some of my school's Year 3 and 4 students are working with me on an interactive Book Rap, composing and posting emails for other schools to share ideas about selected books. Last week, their progress on some narratives about our school's various playground birds was unexpectedly halted by a visit from poet Steven Herrick, which was apart of National Literacy and Numeracy Week.

Few of our students knew of Herrick's work, but we did have three of his titles in the school library. His visit was an overwhelming success. The Year 4 students had already written their bird stories for the rap and were ready to compose their Wrap Rap-up messages to finalise everything, but we all suddenly realised the potential of applying Herrick's unique style of free verse to such writing as the bird narratives. Therefore, I read a few more Herrick poems to the Years 3/4 classes and, when the Year 3's came in for their catch-up book rapping session, to complete their narratives, I encouraged them to use the option of free verse in their final drafts.

A few groups soon reached a stalemate, having exhausted all of their wonderful brainstormed ideas of two weeks ago. It was not long after recess, so we went out into the playground and waited quietly. Sure enough, in came the pigeons and other birds, one by one, to pck through the students' abandoned leftovers of food! In just a few minutes of observation we were witness to: pigeons' meal time; a young male pigeon's first, tentative attempts at courtship; and the "rules" of avian attack/defence. A few minutes later the huge, glossy black crows had also arrived, swooping down, full of confidence, taking over the new bird bath, and having a great time laying down the law of birdlife. The students quickly noticed the "pecking order" of our school's bird population.

We went back into the library full of renewed inspiration. One group, although they'd written their narrative about pigeons in normal paragraphs (and continued to do so), elected to perform it orally for the other groups as free verse poetry, breaking up the sentences into shorter natural phrasing, a la Steven Herrick. When we typed up their final draft, the new presentation style was retained. I was really thrilled with the result!

Normally I wouldn't share student work online, but the poem already appears elsewhere on a public forum, so I can give you a peek:

PIGEONS AT SCHOOL
by Year 3 students (in the style of Steven Herrick).

The playground is empty,

except for the pigeons.

They go and look

for food

in the rubbish

and eat it.

This is now their territory.

Until lunchtime.

A young male pigeon

strives to impress

a new female.

This will be his first mate.

The other pigeons

peck the ground

and other playground birds, who can’t find food,

follow them.

After their meal of scraps

The pigeons go to the bird bath to relax,

and to decide on the next school to visit.


Once again, raising the bar of expectations caused the students to meet - and surpass it.

I've now put up a display board about the book rap in the library, and one story and one poem have been earmarked for next week's school newsletter. Even though I've been "talking up" this book rap with other teachers at every opportunity, and putting items in the school newsletter, the display board has already caused a few teachers in the other stages to realise that there has been all this amazing creativity going on around them, while they stayed in blissful ignorance. So often, teachers get so caught up with their day-to-day class activities they can manage to miss out hearing of other students' and other teachers' success stories. The display board is going to be a great focal point for identifying examples of successful collaborative teaching, and the use of ICT (information and communication technologies) and cooperative student learning in the school library.

The timing has been excellent! I happened to have my 2007 Teacher Assessment and Review Schedule (TARS) talk today, and I had plenty of positive stuff at my fingertips to talk about (not that I'm usually shy about sharing).

The principal gave me some excellent feedback on my first year back in the library. He especially likes my enthusiasm for children's literature, our school's great improvement in the annual Premier's Reading Challenge (103 additional students made it, making a total of 313 this year!), and how I've made the library extra student-friendly.

Beckie the Vigilant

My niece (and God-daughter) in Queensland emailed me in the wee hours to say, "Was awaiting patiently for my nightly giggle, and no blog today???"

How great that someone noticed!

I actually climbed into bed last night after several hours of putting little black dots on an alphabetical list of books, using a master list of books alphabetised by author. The hope is to indicate to the parents, teachers and students at my school which of the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge books are in the collection of our school library. It was a bit of a mind-numbing task (and only half-finished before I was falling asleep over the lists) so that, as soon as I was horizontal and under the doona, I remembered I'd left the day blogless, but was too comfy to beat the curse of midnight.

Eeek! The end of my dream run. Unless I can work out how to change the date on the Blogspot management panel.

Mind you, now I know at least one person noticed I'd missed Monday's entry. So, in a way, that's good. (Also, you'll notice I did two entries on Sunday.)

Sweet Williams: surviving the drought and the heat

I wanted to share this photo of my very healthy-looking Sweet Williams display. I took this shot last week on the back balcony, but they are thriving still, despite some scorching days out here in Penrith, on Sydney's western outskirts.



The unique planter is an Orbital Herb Planta from Go Home Lifestyle Products. I first saw these pots at the Powerhouse Museum when I was there for the Premier's Reading Challenge presentation ceremony, but it was a letter from the Museum's shop just before Christmas, granting me a 20% discount off any purchase, that made me go racing back into the city. I mean, I liked the planter at 40 odd dollars - 20% off made it a bargain! (They'd had a huge stack in the November - and were down to just four left in Christmas week, so it's selling well.)

To plant it out, I literally bought two rectangular punnets of Sweet Williams from Bunnings, broke off clumps and shoved them into each section. No extra soil would fit. The little inner pots stay moist for days because they sit in any extra water without getting sodden. The perfume from the flowers is quite amazing for such small blooms, and the flowers keep replenishing themselves.

Gee, I do have a green thumb, after all.

Because I read...

On Monday, I was invited to join New South Wales Premier, the Honourable Morris Iemma, to a presentation for the conclusion of this year's Premier's Reading Challenge at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. My principal graciously let me attend, in my capacity as a member of the reviewing panel, even though there wasn't much direct benefit to my school.

An innovation of the previous premier, Bob Carr, the first Premier's Reading Challenge's caused a bit of a scramble at Scan, when I worked there, digging through all our old book reviews to find the best of the best in children's literature, both classic and new, to help the coordinator draw up a reading list for school students in time to meet a tight deadline. Since then, the PRC has become a well-oiled machine, and I'm really enjoying being part of the review panel, which meets numerous times each yea, both in person and via email.

5900 students successfully completed the PRC in 2001, but 119 796 did so this year: a 40% increase! The number of students (Years K-9) signing up to take part in the project was almost 260 700. Between them, 3.6 million books were read.

All attendees, big and small, were asked to bring their "favourite book". I took my well-loved Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1, a uniquely Australian publishing phenomenon, which still carries my paternal grandfather's handwritten inscription inside: "to Ian, aged 6." Whenever I riffle through it, being aged six years old seems like only six months ago...

My friend and fellow book review panellist, the prolific author Libby Gleeson, was a guest speaker at Monday's presentation, and I loved the quote she used during her speech. Quoting another Australian children's author, Paul Jennings, she recalled that when Paul was asked by a young fan, "Why do you read, and why should we value reading?", he replied:

"Because I read, I don't bash people up."

So eloquent! Reading allows us to see the world through the points of view of other people, and this helps children (and adults) to realize that all "other people" have thoughts, feelings and actions - whether they are the same as our own thoughts, feelings and actions or not. Reading literature grants us unique and valid perspectives that are not our own.

It would be difficult to sit through such an inspiring day and not be affected by the fact that everyone in that room - and many thousands of others who weren't - have made astounding differences in the lives of 260 700 NSW students in 2006. Amazing stuff.

Next weekend, 410 new book titles will be added to the already-impressive existing PRC booklist.



(ed. E. W. Cole, 70th edition, purchased December, 1964. Originally published: 1879.)