“Bear and Chook by the sea” trailer

Bear and Chook Book Trailer by Marcus from SLJ Trailee Nominees on Vimeo.

This wonderful book trailer is currently nominated in a competition being run by the School Library Journal in the USA. Marcus Graham, son of a teacher librarian colleague I’ve only ever met online (via the NSW DET book raps) is ten years old and recently won the CBCA Book Trailer competition. He is now in the top four for student-created trailers for elementary (primary) students. His trailer is based on “Bear and Chook by the sea” by Lisa Shanahan & Emma Quay.

The winner is chosen by a an online voting facility. The link for viewing the nominees’ trailers and voting is here and is open until 21 October, 2010. Thanks for the tip Stacey and Marcus. And good luck in the Trailee Awards!

Gotta keep reading – a response

Gotta keep reading

CLICK HERE

This is the Year 4 (of 4/5P) students’ response to the famous Ocoee Middle School Youtube flashmob.

The rappers decided they wanted to try using the forward and back buttons of PowerPoint for creating a stop-motion animation to the Youtube-famous version of “Gotta keep reading”. They brought in soft toys from home, and some from the library, and we spent about half an hour doing the main shoot in the playground. It works really well on my laptop, but when we tried to video podcast it, the file was just too big. This .mov version is miniscule, but it’ll give you a taste of the fun we had making it.

The original flashmob is at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6D9jiEYxzs

The kookaburra who stole the moon

This week’s Dreaming story for Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 is “The kookaburra who stole the moon”.

The picture book I usually use for this week’s theme is packed away while the library is being built, so I went looking online instead. Slim pickings on the story itself, although there is a travelling show that’s been around since NAIDOC Week. If only. However… our Youtube resources include:


Kookaburra calls.


First moon landing, 1969.


Apollo 11 on the Sea of Tranquility.


Bunny hopping on the moon – Apollo 17.

Other useful Apollo 11 links are here and here.

BER – the second tour!

Today, the whole staff was given a walk-through of our school’s almost-completed new BER double-classroom and new BER school library. These are some comparison photos with the ones from my sneak preview of the library a few weeks ago:

Library - external

Library - external 2

Library - main doorway

Library - main doorway 2

Library circulation

Library circulation 2

Library office

Library office and storeoom 2

Library - internal

Library - internal 2

Library exit

Library exit 2

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! On the floor is stored some of the shelving and furnishings for the library!

Furniture

Shelving

Mmmm, back at the library… Mind that last step: it’s a doozy!:
Green door
As a colourblind man, I must trust my colleagues as to the colour of this door. But it’s hard to miss, whatever colour it is!

I can’t wait to get all the books and other resources out of storage. There was no time to cull books before packing (done by professional removalists, supervised by me), so I anticipate a massive and essential cull during the first few weeks of set-up.

Emma Quay’s first book trailer!

The students at my school are thrilled that gold-medal winning illustrator, Emma Quay (of “Bear and Chook by the sea” fame), has just shared her first book trailer with us! It’s for her new picture book, “Shrieking Violet”:

Emma had been very impressed with our own efforts in video podcasting, and with the “Creative Commons” music we’d selected to accompany our images. And now it’s our turn to say, “Wow!”