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The most comprehensive list of 2017 theatrical animated features!

The post Preview: 60+ Animated Feature Films to Look for in 2017 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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DreamWorks is outsourcing the production of "Captain Underpants," but where will they make it?

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Those of you who have children at secondary school, or are teachers or librarians, may have come across a new(ish) scheme called Accelerated Reader.

Administered in the UK by Rennaissance Learning, Accelerated Reader is a system that grades books, suggests appropriate reading levels and then monitors pupils' reading by giving them a multiple choice quiz on the book they've just read. The system analyses the quiz responses to show teachers whether the pupil has read the book, and what aspects of it they found difficult (e.g., vocabulary, or higher level comprehension).


If they fly through a couple of quizes, they are rewarded with a higher reading band. They can also collect points according to how long the book was that they read - leading to a total score of words read, and the accolade of 'word millionaire' when they get to the magic 1,000,000 words. They are however expected to stay within their bands - books read outside them, although allowed, do not count for rewards and incentives. For a slower reader, expected to progress at a certain number of books per term, or for a competitive reader, determined to get to the millionaire mark first, this more or less prohibits reading outside the given bands.

According to the National Literacy Trust, the use of Accelerated Reader in schools does actually get more pupils reading, and increases the proportion of pupils in the difficult teenage years who say they enjoy reading, will admit to a favourite book, and read widely across genres.

My daughter's school has just started using the scheme and the number of pupils taking books out of the school library has tripled compared with the same time last year. It's hard to argue with that kind of boost to pupils' interest in books and there really does seem to be a noticeable encouragement to read through the motivation of online quizes and rewards, particularly for boys.

What interests me, though, is the banding structure and the rationale behind it. AR uses a computer programme which scans the books and then analyses them for vocabulary and syntax (proportion of complex sentences). The range of banding for the books in a secondary school library is roughly from about 3 to about 11 or 12 for the very hardest books (for a rough idea of what these mean - R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books are about 3; Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has an AR level of 11.1 )

AR level 3.0

AR level 11.1

More complex sentences and more advanced vocabulary result in a higher banding: and this more or less seems to work in terms of what one thinks of as appropriate progression - nobody is capable of reading Karamazov before they're capable of reading Goosebumps.

But there are two things I think are seriously problematic with the underlying assumptions of this scheme.

The first is a prescription that I think is wrong-headed: that we progress in reading in a straight line - that when we are capable of reading Dostoevsky, we are 'beyond' R.L. Stine. In fact, I think there are plenty of people who might go back and forth between the two and get different pleasures out of each. AR schemes do talk about letting pupils read 'below' their level as occasional 'comfort reads' - but this is presented as a kind of reversion. It's a bit like the idea that we all sometimes need to watch crap telly and eat donuts. It won't enrich our lives but it will give us some 'down-time'. For me, the idea that you are 'slumming it' by reading the 'easier' book is a pernicious one. The lower-level books are not just donuts, they may have all sorts of fabulous and enriching things to say to us as readers - they just do it in a different, though not necessarily less crafted or effective, way.

The second assumption is that the 'straight line' of reading progression is entirely about syntax and vocabulary. And this is where the truly jaw-dropping anomalies of AR banding become apparent. Using the AR website to check the relative banding of books for her, I was amazed to discover that Alan Garner's Owl Service is banded at 3.7. By contrast, Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants is 4.3. And Captain Underpants and the Revolting Radioacive Robo-Boxers (presumably because of the number of multi-syllable words) is a whopping 5.3.

AR level 4.3

AR level 3.7

Bear in mind that the AR scheme suggests pupils are given relatively narrow bands to choose from - my daughter was started on 4.5–4.9. She was too high for The Owl Service, although she couldn't yet read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, at 6.3. If she waited to be able to read the Weirdstone, however, she would be too high to read its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, which is 5.4.

Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur (a fabulous retelling of the Arthur legend from the point of view of a young girl co-opted into helping the bard Merlin, who is presented as a kind of early 'spin-doctor') is 5.6, so she'd reach that well before she was able to read Reeves' knockabout books for younger readers, the Buster Bayliss series (Custardfinger is rated 6.3).

Meanwhile, she is lucky that her favourite author, Marcus Sedgwick, uses relatively simple sentences, as that means that many of his books are in her range (My Swordhand is Singing, a complex tale of vampires set in medieval Eastern Europe, is 4.9). However, she's missed out on his Floodland, which is 3.9, and it won't be long before she's progressed to the point where all of Sedgwick's novels will have to be 'comfort reads', as Kevin-Crossley Holland's magnificent Arthur books already are (4.2–4.3). Never mind - because she can always stretch herself with Daisy Meadows; Kate the Royal Wedding Fairy is 5.4.

AR level 5.4

AR level 5.0

I could go on - but here is one final one to ponder. Debi Gliori's Pure Dead Brilliant is a whopping 7.5. This means you won't be able to progress to it till you are too high for The Lord of The Rings (6.1), and in fact you'd be in the same ball-park band as The Silmarillion at 7.9.

The computer analysis used to grade AR books clearly doesn't read them - it processes them as strings of words. The more important aspects of books - the ideas, the plot twists, the characters, the emotions, the metaphorical language - all of this is entirely missed. Yet this is most of what makes a book enjoyable, memorable, heart-breaking, what touches or thrills you as a reader. I am immensely saddened by the idea that whole swathes of teenagers are going to flick past The Owl Service and fail to pick it off the shelf of the school library because it has a black sticker on it (easy) rather than green or purple (harder, higher, more worthy).

Accelerated Reader is beloved of Ofsted, because it produces quantifiable results and signs of 'progress'. It certainly seems to be getting more pupils reading, and excited about getting their rewards and stickers - but it's encouraging at the same time a very quantitative approach to what reading is, and how we should do it. According to the National Literacy Trust survey, an extra 7% of pupils using the scheme are prepared to say they enjoy reading compared with those that don't use it. I wonder if that's an achievement worth celebrating if 100% of those pupils now think of reading as a goal-oriented activity with 'difficult' vocabulary being the measure of value?



Cecilia Busby writes fantasy adventures for children aged 7-12 as C.J. Busby. Her latest book, Dragon Amber, was published in September by Templar.


www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)

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Fellow Boomerang Blogger, Romi Sharp recently congratulated me on hitting my first century. Gob smacked! I mean I don’t even own a cricket bat, let alone know how to hold one. She meant blogs of course. I hardly noticed. They rack up and slip by like birthdays these days. Nonetheless, even numbers deserve celebration (especially […]

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Twitter @savitakalhan
My website
 

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I have a sister.  Did you know that?  Tis true.  She’s not a librarian and her interest in children’s literature pretty much begins and ends with me, which is probably why she hasn’t come up before.  One thing she is?  Crafty.  Crafty as all get out.  And the kicker is that she’s just started this new blog called The How To, How Hard, and How Much to Your Creative Products.  Here’s how she describes it:

What if there was a blog out there that took Pinterest ideas and showed people how to do it, how much time it took, how much money was spent, and had a level of expertise (1-5). Maybe even sell the final product. Is this something people would read? Has it already been done? How could I rope guys into doing it (other than if it involved mustaches and bacon)? I’ve never blogged before but I feel like it might be helpful, especially since the holiday season is quickly approaching. People could even send me recommendations and I could do those as well.

And make it she has.  Amongst other things she has a wide range of Halloween ideas including spider cookies, 5 minute ideas, and my personal favorite, the cleaver cupcakes.  In fact, if you could just repin those cupcakes onto your Pinterest boards she’d be mighty grateful (there’s a contest she’s entering them into).  But of special interest to the blog (aside from outright nepotism) was her recent posting on literary jewelry where she turned a book of mine into a bracelet.  Nicely done, l’il sis.

• I attended the Society of Illustrators event the other day (did you know the place is free on Tuesdays?!) and the New York Times Best Illustrated results are on the cusp of an announcement soon.  Both lists are chosen by artists as well as librarian types, and so one could consider them the form with which artists are allowed to voice their opinions about the best of the year (just as the National Book Awards are how authors talk about writing).  Still, there are those that have disliked the Caldecott from the outset because it is decided not by artists but librarians.  Robin Smith recently dug up a 1999 interview with Barry Moser voicing just such a concern.  A hot little discussion then emerged in the Horn Book comments.  Go!  See!

• Brian Biggs + Jon Scieszka + 6 way auction = interesting.

• I think a fair number of us have seen Business Insider’s Most Famous Book Set in Every State map by this point, but I’d just like to mention that what pleases me the most about it is the fact that they included children’s books as well as adult.  Six children’s and one YA novel by my count.

• Let’s Talk About Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants, and Misogyny.  So says author Lynn Messina.  Interesting title, no?

• And since we’re on an interesting title kick, let’s throw out another one.  True or False? Multicultural Books Don’t Sell.  We’ve all heard that argument before.  Now an actual honest-to-god bookseller tackles the question.  You may normally know Elizabeth Bluemle from the ShelfTalker blog at PW, but here she’s guest talking at Lee & Low.  Cleverly, she specifies whether or not we are talking about how they don’t sell to kids or how they don’t sell to adults.  Without giving anything away, let me just say that her experiences mirror my own in the library.

In other press release news, I am shocked and appalled that I wasn’t aware of this until now.  I mean, I knew that Kate Beaton, the genius behind Hark, A Vagrant, was working on children’s books.  What I did not know was how close to fruition my dream of shelving her in my children’s sections truly was.  The Wired blog Underwire, of all places, was the one with the scoop when they interviewed Ms. Beaton.  She discusses the book, which contains her most famous creation (the fat pony) and a princess.  Says she about princesses in general, “. . . for little girls historically [princesses] are the only people like them who had any power at all. It’s not just oh, princes and dresses. It’s also, here’s a person with agency. Is she just someone who wants a pretty dress and prince? Or is she a warrior living in a battle kingdom? I think it just depends on how you depict what a princess is.”  I think we know the direction Ms. Beaton will go in.  And I waaaant it.  Thanks to Seth Fishman for the link.

• As slogans go, this might be one of my favorites: “Kill time. Make history”.  How do you mean?  Well, NYPL is looking for a few good bored folks. Say they, “The New York Public Library is training computers how to recognize building shapes and other information from old city maps. Help us clean up the data so that it can be used in research, teaching and civic hacking.”  Sometimes I just love my workplace.

• Me stuff time.  Or rather, stuff I’m doing around and about the world that you might like to attend.  You see, on November 6th I’ll be interviewing legendary graphic novelist Paul Pope at 4pm at the Mulberry Street library branch here in NYC.  If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Pope’s name, all you really need to know is that he’s a three time Eisner Award winning artist who wrote the recent GN Battling Boy and whose work is currently on display at the Society of Illustrators on their second floor (which just means I get to tell you again that you can get in for free on Tuesdays).  This event will also be free.  If you’ve ever wondered what the “Mick Jagger of graphic novels” would look like, you’ll find out soon enough.

• Also going on in NYC, they have transferred Allegra Kent’s Ballerina Swan to the stage for kids.  Makes perfect sense when you put it that way.

• This is utterly delightful.  Recently Picture Book Month’s Education Consultant Marcie Colleen contacted me with this awesome PDF entitled Picture Book Month Teacher’s Guide: Why Picture Books Belong in Our Classrooms.  It was so useful, in fact, that I tapped her for an upcoming Children’s Literary Salon about the Core Curriculum.  More about that later, though . . .

• My reaction to finding out that Henry Selick was going to direct Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark and Grimm was simple.  The best possible person is doing the best possible thing and is making everyone happy in the process.  My sole concern?  Selick’s going live action on this.  What was the last live action film he directed?  Monkeybone, you say?  Ruh-roh.  Thanks to PW Children’s Bookshelf for the link.

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As Occupy Wall Street remains in full force (MTV will cover the movement in a special segment aptly called “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street.” Watch the clip of the episode which will follow three Millennials involvement in the day-to-day... Read the rest of this post

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Our good buddy Sammer is really burning up the blogline this summer. (Summer--burning up? Oh, haaaa, haaaa, haaaa!!! I'm too funny for words!!) Anyway, let's see what he wants to tell us about today:

I've read over and over and over and am reading now...THE CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS SERIES!!!!! By Dav Pilkey.SNAP!!!!Mr.Krup is now....CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!!!George,Harold and Captain Underpants go through many adventures fighting off evil people including The Wicked Wedgie Woman,The Bionic Booger Boy,Professor Pippy P. Poopypants,The Talking Toilets,The Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space and The Purple Potty People. Each are great books and if you read these books and like them, you might want to try RICKY RICOTTA'S MIGHTY ROBOT also by Dav Pilkey. There are EIGHT books total.I encourage you to read them.

Thanks, Sammer! Yep, Dav Pilkey seems to be a real favorite with guys. We can't keep the Captain Underpants or Ricky Ricotta books on our shelves because someone is always checking them out. Do we have any other Dav Pilkey fans out there? Let us hear from you!!

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What We Wear Under There   by Ruth Freeman Swain  illustrated by John O'Brien  Holiday House  2008  A picture book history of undergarments over the ages that provides some basic coverage but nonetheless has a few holes. This was a book on my radar some time ago that dropped off and resurfaced mysteriously.  All I could remember going in was how I thought this was the perfect subject for a

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Did you all have a lovely holiday?

Mine was great and now I'm back from my blogging vacation with a BIG FANTASTIC GIVEAWAY! (as promised)

But first, a review...

The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future Dav Pilkey

So, the conceit here is that, like The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, this is another comic book written by George and Harold, the stars of Captain Underpants.

Ook and Gluk are two cave kids in 500,001 BC who like to annoy their evil chief. After defeating the chief, the big trouble begins because the chief finds that one of his descendants has built a time portal from 2222 AD and is using it to steal the prehistoric world of all the natural resources that no longer exist in the future.

Ook and Gluk and their baby dinosaur, Lily, go to the future to defeat them and end up learning the ways of kung-fu.

Lots of great lessons from martial arts here--

The mind is stronger than the flesh. It can defeat any opponent, no matter how strong.

The best fighters do not show their anger. The wisest warrior wins without a battle.

AND! Lots of flip-o-rama action-- 9 different flip-o-ramas.

Now, as this was "written" by George and Harold the spelling and grammar are awful (not helped by the fact that half the characters speak caveman). I don't mind this in concept. If we fight for realism in our books, I think we need to fight for it at all ages-- younger kids don't spell perfectly and don't speak perfectly. I have no problem with books aimed at younger kids mirroring this reality. Especially because I think most kids get it-- the know it's wrong, but at the same time it's reassuring that not everyone is a perfect speller.

But, as an adult reader, the spelling is a little annoying and sometimes I had to think about a word before realizing what it was supposed to be (reading out loud helps with this.)

You can see an inside peek here!

More than anything though, as fun as this book was, and as much as the kids I know like it, the kids have only one question, and it's a question I share-- WHEN DO WE GET NEW CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS?!

NOW THE BIG GIVEAWAY!

Scholastic is sponsoring a huge holiday gift giveaway for one lucky winner.

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Kung-Fu Cavemen From the Future  The second graphic novel by  George Beard and Harold Hutchins  the creators of   Captain Underpants    (along with Dav Pilkey) Blue Sky Press / Scholastic 2010 Those bad boys of hypnotic mischief are back (finally!) with an epic 175 page tale of time-traveling cavemen who learn kung-fu and save the planet, both then and in the future.  Really, do you need to

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The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung Fu Cavemen From the Future
The second graphic novel by George Beard and Harold Hutchins,
the creators of CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS (aka Dav Pilkey)
Scholastic (Blue Sky Press), 2010
Review copy purchased with my very own money.

I'm sorry to have to tell the Newbery Committee this, but I'm afraid that while this book will never even be considered for the Newbery Medal, it is likely to be the most popular book in my fourth grade classroom in the first weeks of school.

As a public service to all nervous teachers, parents, librarians and grandparents, I have read this book cover to cover and I pronounce it to be hysterically funny.  Laugh out loud funny. I also would like to assure the above audiences that I do not believe that the spelling mistakes that George and Harold make in their comics will in any way cause children's brains to rot and impair their ability to learn to spell correctly or write coherently. If the children who read this book don't know that there are misspelled words, they'll still be able to understand and enjoy the story. If the children who read this book DO know that there are misspelled words, well, hooray that they can recognize the misspellings. They'll still be able to understand and enjoy the story.

And while we're on the subject of spelling, phonics, and understanding a story, Pilkey totally rewards his readers for sounding out long (but not hard) words. One character is named Chief Goppernopper.  He is variously referred to as Chief Grasshopper, Gobstopper, and Gumwrapper (to name a few).  Pilkey goes off on extended riffs of rhyming with Gluk's name (rhymes with duck, stuck, truck...) and Ook's name (rhymes with duke, spook, kook...).

There are kid-level allusions to popular culture: the whole section where they learn Kung Fu in the future hearkens back to Karate Kid, and there are chapter title pages that are Star Wars and Jurassic Park take-offs.  There are puns, like on Flip-o-rama #8:  "Mechasaurus Wrecks!" (Tyrannosaurus Rex?) where the robot dinosaurs destroy a tower. There are, as in the Captain Underpants books, billboards that get their meaning changed, in this case when they are zapped by futuristic ray guns in a chase scene. For example, "I went to BOB'S POOLS to buy my pool! Now I dive in my pool, swim under the waves, and wear a BIG smile!!!" becomes "I went POO poo in my underwear".  Besides the potty humor, there is a decent amount of barf humor. Kid humor. Spot-on kid humor.

Find out more at Dav Pilkey's website, and at the Scholastic website. But most of all, don't be afraid of this book.

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Read Banned Books! It's Banned Books Week September 26-October 3...

The American Library Association Banned Books Week is going on now. Here's a bit from their blog about this week dedicated to "celebrating the freedom to read":

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

Click here for an Amazon list of banned books for young readers. (And if you stop by my house this evening you can enjoy a read-aloud of Captain Underpants which will never be banned in my house. Then maybe you can explain to me why people have a problem with a little poo humor.)

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...and the Cyborg Substitute...and the League of Librarianswritten and illustrated by Jarret J. KrosoczkaAlfred A. Knopf 2009There's evil afoot, and Lunch Lady is there with her trusty hair-netted sidekick Betty to thwart it. Whether its a league of librarians who plan to intercept all the new video game consoles coming in fresh off he boat, or the mild-mannered teacher who created a robot

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Hello all in the Land of Blog!!!!! Darth Bill returns with more groovy and hip news to report. So hang on to your hats, you hepcats cause here we go:

The first super cool thing I have is a Captain Underpants Series Review by Khar Johnson:

Captain Underpants is the name of the series and it is written and is drawn by Dav Pilkey. This is a great series and the three main characters are George, Harold and Captain Underpants. I like this series because it is funny and has comics in it also. I love Comic Books.

I am sorry to report that I have yet to have the chance to read any of the Captain Underpants books but will be sure to do so in the near future. I know this is an extremely popular series that is always being checked out at our library. As always sense this was Khar's first review for us we gave him a free book. We also tried to take his picture but he turned out to be quite invisible. Check it out and see what I mean:

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This may change in a day, Wikipedia being what it is, but as of this moment right now there are two mysterious entries on the subject of Captain Underpants (look under Series of titles), detailing upcoming books that are (according to Scholastic) not currently in the works. Is this the frenzied scribblings of an uber-fan or could Pilkey be mucking with our brains? Only time will tell.

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My library is gearing up for a slam-bang, whiz-bop, good-as-it-could-possibly-get Captain Underpants Party. We're talking underwear on the outside of clothing and on your head and anywhere else underwear is not supposed to go. I've my heart set on a pair of utterly out-of-date He-Man underoos. Oh, Santa. Where are you when I need you?

In any case this party will be on Saturday, April 21, from approximately 3:00-4:45, and you're all invited. Now Captain Underpants creator Dav Pilkey is apparently notoriously reclusive. This is what I have heard. Yet some research done by my co-workers pulled up this highly amusing speech he gave to a group of teachers not too long ago. There's a lovely shot of John Mason at the beginning (charming man) and then Dav proceeds to explain how he pretty much loathed and despised every teacher he ever had. That sounds bad, except he manages to say it in such a way that the audience loves him all the more by the end. Good stuff, in case you've ever wondered what the real Dav Pilkey was like.

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