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Woo Hoo

Guardian Angel Publishing Authors
Will blog the 7 days of  Children's Book Week

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In honor of Children's Book Week, here are some vintage posters for you to peruse. Enjoy!

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As part of the celebrations for Children’s Book Week at M and J’s school, all Year 2 children (aged 6-7) wrote a short book review for display in our local bookshop, Waterstones. The idea behind this was to encourage them to visit a book shop, to talk about their favourite books, and to give them a “real life” writing opportunity. Here’s what some of their reviews looked like:

This is M’s book review: “My favourite book is the blak book of colas because it is about colas and a blinde chiled” (To find out more about The Black Book of Colours you can read this post on Playing by the book)

Here’s part of the display with reviews and books in the bookshop:

I really hope this experience will encourage the families of the reviewers to visit the bookshop and talk about books together, as well as generating a little bit of pride and excitement amongst the six year olds!

I also have to commend the staff at Waterstones for being so open to the idea of having book reviews from the children and taking the whole idea on board with such enthusiasm. It’s been a pleasure to work with them.

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[Doing a little dance ] Today is the start of Children’s Book Week here in the UK!

I’ll be at M and J’s school today launching a book exchange, our first big activity for Children’s Book Week.

The idea for this grew out of the fact that our local library closed 18 months ago and so I wanted to find a way to encourage the children I came into contact with through reading at my girls’ school to not lose the habit of reading new books and discovering new delights. As I thought about how I might support a mini local library through the school I first came across @BookElfLeeds and her Travelling Suitcase Library and then the utterly gorgeous Free Little Library movement. I decided to take the best from both worlds and thus the school Book Exchange was born.

The Book Exchange lives in this suitcase, which I got just a teensy bit carried away with decorating…

I used images from book catalogues, book calendars and book magazines and simply glued them on to the suitcase with PVA glue before finishing it off with a couple of layers of clear varnish. My thanks go to @redtedart and @makeitandmendit for their advice on glue and varnish!

Inside the suitcase is a wide variety of children’s books, some of which were donated by Melanie of Library Mice fame and some of which were bought with funds from Tidy Book‘s sponsorship of our book week events.

The idea of the exchange is very simple – children donate a book to the exchange library and then they can take a book from the exchange library. That’s all there is to it. If they love their new book they can keep it forever. If they don’t want to keep it they can swap it again the following week.

Because kids at M and J’s school already get reading books twice a week and school library books every week we had to find a way of identifying books that are part of the book exchange so I created a logo which we’ve printed on stickers and stuck to the exchange library stock.

Please feel free to re-use this logo if you would like to set up a book exchange (simple right click on the image of the logo and save as, or email me if you need an svg version of the image).

We sent home a letter to parents explaining what the purpose

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Here’s the last lot of session plans for our day off-timetable as part of Children’s Book Week next week. These sessions are for year 2 studens (6-7 year olds) and are based on their current topic “Oceans and Seas”.

Session 1

Book: The fantastic undersea life of Jacques Cousteau by Dan Yaccarino
Follow up book: Manfish: The Story of Jacques Cousteau by Jennifer Berne and Eric Puybaret
Focus activity: Watching a short video of Jacques Cousteau then creating a porthole through which creatures of the deep can be viewed.
Resources required: paper plates, strips of tissue paper in shades of blue, glue, permanent pens/crayons (make sure whatever you use does not run when glue is painted over it, and that the colours are strong enough to be visible through the tissue paper), scissors, grey paint (optional – for painting the plates to make them look more like portholes).
Independent activities: Set of ocean factfiles with colouring in and also some maths-based, ocean-themed activities all from learningpage.com (you need to sign up for access to these, but sign up is quick, easy and free)
Additional books: Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea by Steve Jenkins, Star of the Sea: A Day in the Life of a Starfish by Janet Halfmann and Joan Paley

1. Take one plate and draw a creature of the deep in the centre of the plate.
2. Glue strips of tissue paper across your plate (this will look best if the tissue paper has previously been scrunched up and is then smoothed out again)
3. Take your second plate and cut out the central circle. Optionally paint this plate gray.
4. Put glue around the rim of the first plate and stick the second plate on top to create your porthole
5. Trim away any excess tissue paper left hanging out between the plates.

Random House has produced a Teacher’s Sheet for The fantastic undersea life of Jacques Cousteau which contains lots of discussion prompts (opens as a pdf document).

Session 2

Book: Immi by Ka

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Here are our plans for Year 1 (5 and 6 year olds) on our special Book Day, as part of Children’s Book Week. Year 1′s theme is “Castles”. Please feel free to reuse, adapt and share any of the resources on this page.

Session 1

Book: Shhh! by Sally Grindley and Peter Utton
Follow up book: Castles by Colin Thompson (which I reviewed here)
Focus Activity: Make a castle pop up card
Resources required: A4 card folded in half, castle template printed on paper and then pre-cut (if working with an older group or with more time in the session, the cutting could be left for the children to do), glue, pens / crayons / pencils to decorate
Independent activities: Giant colouring-in sheets, activity sheet based on local castle (Weoley Castle, NB link is to pdf file), castle dot-to-dot sheets, one from printactivities.com and another from dottodots.net.
Additional books: Castle by David MacCauley, The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde, illustrated by Michael Foreman and Freire Wright. These additional books will be available for children to read / look at during the session, and also if needed by staff to read if there is “spare” time to be filled in the session.

Click here to download the castle template (a pdf file).

To create your card, line up the central fold in the A4 card with the central fold in the precut castle template. Stick glue on castle flaps. The castle should “fit inside” your card, even when the card is folded.

For other ideas about how to use Shhh! by Sally Grindley and Peter Utton in the classroom take a look at these lessons plans from Nursery World.

Session 2

Book: Tell me a dragon by Jackie Morris (which I reviewed here)
Follow up book: There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon by Jack Kent
Focus Activity: Make an egg box dragon inspired by this idea from Nurture Store but simplified to use only 1 egg box per child.
Resources required: egg boxes, paint & a paint brush (optional) , red paper, glue / sticky tape

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Here are our plans for Foundation Stage (3-5 year olds) on our special Book Day, as part of Children’s Book Week. Foundation stage’s theme is “Ourselves”. Please feel free to reuse, adapt and share any of the resources on this page.

Session 1

Book: The Great Big Book of Families by Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquith
Follow up book: Kids by Laurence and Catherine Anholt
Focus activity: (Group) collage with images of children and families
Resources required: pre-cut-out images of people from magazines, either paper and glue or contact paper
Additional Books: Big Book of Families by Laurence and Catherine Anholt, So Much by Trish Cooke and Helen Oxenbury.

A cautionary note: When we chose this activity we didn’t realise how difficult it would be to find plenty of images of non-white people in magazines. Although maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise it was still a shock to realise how rarely non-white faces feature in “general interest” magazines. I found the best source of inclusive images was council publications! Finding photos of disabled people doing normal every day activities was even more difficult.

Session 2

Book: Wake Up! by Katie Cleminson (which I reviewed here)
Follow up book: Tuck me in! by Dean Hacohen and Sherry Scharschmidt (which I reviewed here)
Focus activity: “Dressing” dolls with a collage made from fabric squares
Resources required: “Dolls” (we’re using this image and printing it on A4 paper), lots of small fabric squares (I cut up some of my remnants I’ve been hanging on to from various sewing projects, but you could ask children to donate old, worn clothes and cut them up if you don’t have your own fabric stash), wool cut into strips, PVA glue, pens/pencils to decorate the dolls and add faces.
Additional Books: Kiss Good Night, Sam by Amy Hest, illustrated by Anita Jeram, All in a Day by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Nikki McClure

Session 3

Books: If you’re happ

3 Comments on Celebrating Children’s Book Week – Ourselves, last added: 9/27/2011

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Yesterday I wrote about one way we’re hoping that Children’s Book Week will get families at school talking about books and the reading they enjoy. Another activity we’ve got planned to bring people together to celebrate the pleasure of reading is a free family showing of the beautiful animation Eleanor’s Secret (which I reviewed here).

The film will be shown in the school gym one afternoon after the end of the school day and children are being invited to attend with all the family. We’ll have a mixture of seats and mats, so the atmosphere should be rather informal and fun.

There are some licensing issues surrounding showing films at school (Thanks to twitter user @JfB57 for pointing me to this information) and so we have had to apply for a special licence to show the film. This has been made possible by sponsorship from Tidy Books, for which we are most grateful.

Eleanor’s Secret is all about the power of reading, the life storybook characters can lead and the fun that can be had when you share your life with them so it makes for a perfect film for Children’s Book Week, but you could instead choose to show a film adaptation of a book or any of these films which share a theme of reading, stories and literacy.

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Books, especially for young readers, have always been considered to be a weapon during wars because of the influence they can have on the reader. This was as true for the Allied Powers as much as it was for the Axis Powers during World War II. Despite paper shortages everywhere, a good number of children’s books were still written and published between 1939 and 1945.

Children’s Book Week, sponsored by the Children’s Book Council, has been celebrating books and reading and encouraging youthful readers since 1919. Each year the Council commissions a poster by a well-known illustrator of children’s books for the purpose of commemorating this week.

75 Years of Children’s Book Week Posters contains the first 69 posters for Children’s Book Week. This is a book well worth close examination if you are a reader who really appreciates the work of each illustrator in the books you read. According to the publisher’s description of the book, these posters are not only first rate illustrations, but the also reflect the history, social climate and wider concerns of the country at the time each was created.

This made me think of one of my favorite quotes about children’s books by A.S.W. Rosenbach, who was a famous rare book seller and collector of children’s book. In 1933, in the introduction to his own book Early American Children’s Books, Rosenbach wrote:

“…more than any other class of literature, [children’s books] reflect the minds of the generation that produced them. Hence no better guide to the history and development of any country can be found than its juvenile literature.” (pg xxvii)

I think about this quote each time I read a kidlit book.

Since this is Children’s Book Week at the Children’s Book Council, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the posters that were created for it during World War II.

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It started when I was with the Random House folk at Supanova. They told me about a book trailer competition they're running for teenagers. It wasn't yet up - and when it is up, they will be giving some firm conditions, which are necessary because they'll be putting it up on-line. It has to be copyright-free material. Obviously, I suspect, there will be limitations even on such things as filming your young brother or sister, because of regulations about that (I saw the ladies taking a photo of a costumed con attendee for the RH blog, but not her small daughter). The copyright-free web site they gave me turned out to be copyright-free but not money-free. You have to pay for use of images from the site. While trying to work out if I could maybe put in a school subscription for the purpose, and because the information is STILL not up on the web site (something on YouTube, but not all the information), I surfed for genuinely free sites, but the few I found were limited in what they had.

I realised that I could use some public domain images and music, although the students might not find that of much interest, but I did have to have a sample - and I thought that perhaps we could have a book trailer competition for Children's Book Week, with a lunchtime festival. The trailers wouldn't go on-line, but we could show them at lunchtime and maybe burn a DVD for the library, to show next year's students. That way, we could use what we want and have fun.

As I haven't yet worked out the mysteries of iMovie, apart from dumping existing films on it, and I go back to work tomorrow, I have spent most of my post-Swancon time today putting together a basic PowerPoint book trailer for Wolfborn. It's very crude, but I've learned some things by experimenting and will learn more as soon as I can get someone to sit with me and explain.

Meanwhile, my class can have a huge laugh at my expense and go do something much better, once they work out which book they'd like to use. It's a nice way of making them think about a book they like - and one girl in my class was asking if she could do an animated piece for her assignment last time (too late, alas, or I'd know just how good she is).

I actually found a picture of a wolf howling under TWO moons (there are three in my world, but maybe the third isn't up yet), a Breton castle, some Arthur Rackham fairies (public domain), a dark forest, a bas-relief of Cernunnos, a wolfhound and a - hopefully - public domain portrait of Attila the Hun to go with the "Ruthless villains!" slide.

I'd like to come up with something a bit speedier than the score I used in the end, but I managed to get the right timing for the second half of "The Ring Goes South" from the FOTR score and it kind of worked. There was a nice dramatic flourish during the "Wild Hunt" slide.

Awful as it is, I'm kind of proud at having given it a go. It's an achievement, doing something I haven't tried before (well, PowerPoints, yes, but not with a story, music and theme).

Because of copyright I can't put it up on-line, but if anyone wants to have a look and a giggle, ask me privately and I'll see if i can share the file with you.

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All this week, to celebrate Children’s Book Week, we’re having a daily book giveway. To enter the giveway, just come back and visit our blog every day and leave a comment each day.

About the Book: The Adventures of P.J. and Split Pea, Volume I, published by Outskirts Press, is the first in S.D. Moore’s series of three books about the fanciful adventures of a young boy and his British accented parrot. Geared to children eight and under, the book is illustrated in full color by veteran artist Bobbi Switzer and offers a message about self image appealingly delivered through the goofy antics of these two physically flawed friends.

Known as “the little kid with the big voice” by his loving, but absent father, young P.J. is teased at school by his classmates for his short stature. He makes a trip to the local pet store and after rejecting a number of possible animal companions, decides on a less than perfect parrot named Split Pea, who speaks in a British accent.

Split Pea can’t fly, but P.J. is determined to solve that problem through a series of amusing, but ultimately unsuccessful fixes. During the course of their developing friendship, P.J. and Split Pea learn to accept each other as they actually are: one short boy and one earth bound parrot who have become fast friends.

The Adventures of P.J. and Split Pea has received accolades from Entrepreneur Magazine, who calls S.D. Moore’s book an “original and entertaining story for young readers,” and from BuildingRainbowes.com, who praises it as “humorous and entertaining.” The full color illustrations are by veteran children’s book illustrator Bobbi Switzer who has more than a handful of beautifully illustrated children’s works under her belt.

The Adventures of P.J. and Split Pea, Volume I, Fine Feathered Friends, offers parents of young children the reassurance that they are being taught that love is not based on how a person looks, while the imaginative story line offers children eager for a good read the inherent entertainment of a talking bird who becomes a boy’s best friend.

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Sorry to be so late in posting these Children's Book Week Links. I've been busy with a serious family matter.


From the Children’s Book Council: Children’s Book Week 2010 Bookmark

From Crayola: National Children’s Book Week

From Scholastic: National Children’s Book Week

From the Children’s Book Council: CBC Announces 2010 Children’s Choice Book Awards Finalists

From The Beacon: Read with your kids for Children's Book Week
(Book recommendations and more from the Beaufort County Public Library)

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I think Dr. Seuss sums it up best . . .

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go.
- Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut

Happy Children's Book Week!

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All this week, to celebrate Children’s Book Week, we’re having a daily book giveway. To enter the giveway, just come back and visit our blog every day and leave a comment each day.

Today’s book for the giveway is Griffin’s Castle by Jenny Nimmo.

About the Book: After years of having moved around, eleven-year-old Dinah determines to make a huge, dilapidated old mansion into a home for her mother and herself, but the wild beasts she summons from a stone wall to protect her may also imprison her.

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What better way for this children’s book writer to celebrate Children’s Book Week than to capture the event’s heart in a Zeno poem, the original poetic format shared last Friday, May 7 in my fellow TeachingAuthor April Halprin Wayland’s post.

Wave your bookmark! Clap! Shout! Holler,
“Let’s go, readers!”
This week
beams
on Children’s Books -
golden
reams
of pages bound.
How each
gleams!

Sponsored by The Children’s Book Council since 1919 (!) and administrated by Every Child a Reader, this year’s May 10-16 celebration includes a bounty of brand-new events and initiatives to accompany the third annual Children’s Choice Book Awards.
The CBC is partnering with a bookstore in at least 10 cities to stage CBW events, including Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis, San Jose and Philadelphia. Former Children’s Book Ambassador Jon Scieszka and current Ambassador Katherine Paterson appear May 10 at the Barnes & Noble at 86th and Lexington. To learn what’s going on in your neck of the woods, check CBC Online.
CBW receives a boost from a first-time TV partnership. Lifetime's The Balancing Act hosts a different author every morning from May 10-14, including Scieszka, Johnette Downing, Barbara Bottner, Jo Nobisso, and Carol Nevius.

The online website offers all sorts of fun, meaningful ways for teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents, writers and of course, last but not least, young readers to celebrate children’s books and the wondrous book selections available to kids this week, May 10 through 16, but any week, any month, any year, every year.

• Share how-to instructions for making Children’s Book Week bookmarks.
• Check out the downloadable Children’s Book Week Crossword and Word Search puzzles.
• Be sure to also check listings for your local libraries, local booksellers and local community events.

And, don't forget Jeanne Marie's Monday, May 10 Writing Workout link to the Children's Book Week Story Starters created by National Ambassador Katherine Paterson, Eoin Colfer, Barbara Park, Lemony Snickets and others. Mo Willem's contribution starts a short comic story titled "BLAM!" His opening line? 
"DUDE! DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE NEW TEACHER?"

Happy Children's Book Week!

Esther Hershenhorn

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A most Vivid Day

Justin Young

Picture Book

Ages 4 to 8

Golden Tree Press, 2010, 978-0-9785418-1-1
   One night a bat called Tommy goes with the other bats to find his daily meal. Tommy finds an apple tree, and he is just about to take a big bite out of one of the apples when a caterpillar tells him that the apple is not ripe. “You should pick a ripe apple that is a delicious red color,” says the caterpillar. The problem is that Tommy has no idea what red is. Being an animal of the night, he has never seen colors before, and he is not convinced that the caterpillar is telling the truth.

   Tommy decides to stay up to see what color is, and when the sun rises, he sees, for the first time, what blue, green, red, and orange looks like. Everything the sun paints with his paintbrush gets a color that delights the eye. The sun not only paints the sky, the flowers, and the grass, but he also paints all the animals, and Tommy decides that he too would like to have a color; he would like to be red!

   Children are sure to enjoy this story, which explores the idea that beauty truly is all around us. In addition, the author looks at the ways in which problems can be solved amicably if people will just be civil and generous towards each other.

   Full of gorgeous watercolor paintings that are bright and full of life, this book is sure to become a bedtime reading favorite. 

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