Booked Inn

And now, it’s time to share the three wiki fables my group of gifted and talented Early Stage 1 (Kindergarten) students came up with this last term.

Inspired by last year’s four Core Values Fables (written by the previous Kindergarten cohort), we decided, as a group, to write some new jointly-constructed fables to focus upon our school motto: “Forward With Pride”. This became the moral for each fable. If you thought last year’s fables were a little out of left field, then this year’s three (there were going to be four, but one was cannibalised and abandoned) are truly in “The Twilight Zone”.

ENTER, if you dare!

If you’d like to know how these stories evolved, there are annotations and scribed brainstorming sessions recorded on the wiki, too. For example:

Why did we use a wiki to write and publish our school fables?
* “We can show all people in the world and they’ll know how clever Penrith kids are.”
* “To tell children something, not just use books.”
* “Our families can look for the wiki on the Internet.”
* “We can be famous. And then more famous than Aesop.”
* “You can type quicker on a computer, and send it further, like even to another country or out into space.”
* “People we don’t know can see our work.”
* “So we can read the fables on the computer, even if we had no money to buy a book.”
* “You could use a wiki to keep a diary and write in it every day, and everyone could read it.”
* “We can write our fables using the computer and the Internet.”

What had we learned when we were finished?
* “With Google Images we can find lots of exciting pictures of animals.”
* “If something happens in the world, like an earthquake, we can warn people by the Internet to get into a safety zone.”
* “Sometimes people go to different countries and they can use the Internet to stay in touch.”
* “On the Internet we can learn about other countries, which have different people.”

What will we do next?
* “We should do more hot seat [drama activities].”
* “We could read more Aesop’s fables in books.”
* “Draw more pictures for the fables we’ve done.”
* “Show our [class] teachers and the whole class.”
* “Learn about more fables.”
* “Make books out of fables.”
* “Learn about other things to put on the wiki.”
* “Learn more about animals on the Internet [with Google Images], like when we found the pictures of peacocks and an emu and a rhino – and some pictures were of the rhinoceros beetle and the rhinoceros snake!”
* “Do smart things on the wiki so we can get smarter.”
* “Do it again, but this time with dinosaurs!”

It had to happen: another of my analogies has taken on a life of its own.

Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students at my school have been studying Aboriginal Dreaming stories, interspersed with factual information about the animals/characters featured.

A few weeks ago, it was “Why the emu cannot fly”, followed by information reports about emus and other flightless birds. We also backed up the accumulation of facts with a few picture books, such as “Edwina the emu” by Sheena Knowles and Rod Clement, because fictitious Edwinda leaves poor ol’ partner Edward on the nest of large green eggs, just like in real life.

The students discussed possibilities of why emu eggs were green, and we considered the camouflaging patterns of baby emus, which enable them to hide in the shadows, away from predators. I compared their stripey patterns to that of zebras in Africa.

In our final week of the unit about dreaming stories, we’ve been using a book of Australian birds and I’ve been modelling the use of the index to look examples. The students were facinated that this particular index had no X, Y or Z, but someone in each class has usually been able to explain that, obviously, there are no major Australian birds starting with those letters. (I think I even said something stupid like, “If zebras were Australian birds, they’d be listed down here”, as I pointed to the end of the index – with my index finger.)

Of course, a whole week later, our oral revision of Australian bird facts had turned up the inadequacies of human memories. My question about camouflaging emu chicks was answered thusly:

“Baby emus have stripes so that goannas and snakes will mistake them for zebras.”

I’d been consoling myself by telling another teacher who came into the library the next day – we had a good laugh about it – but then, as if planned that way, one of her students came out the same factoid.

Oh dear. Chinese whispers are alive and well. And so, too, are Australia’s feral zebras, it seems.

The infamous spotted zebra of western Sydney: we believe he can camouflage in a litter of dalmations.

I’ve encountered some funny “nude moment” incidents in primary school libraries.

During the furore of Pamela Allen’s Mr McGee (he of the “biting flea” picture book fame) getting shortlisted by the CBCA for getting his pants off a few years ago, someone on this list announced that she’d made him a lovely pair of yellow tissue-paper underpants. We never did find out if she was
joking. I wonder if the wretched nude castaway of Armin Greder’s “The Island” also sports fashions from the House of McGee at that school?

At my previous school, there was an extremely popular donated yearbook of Australian photojournalism in the library, and it was always being found hidden under a chair, or with the “Where’s Wally” and “Goosebumps” books behind the heaters. Eventually I realised it must have had something controversial inside, so I held the spine in my hand and let the book fall open at its most-used pages – and my trick revealed a rather lovely distance shot of Bondi Beach’s topless bathing end. Cleverly framing the shot was a closeup of a blurred naked female breast..

Eventually, someone destroyed the photo with a Texta and I tried removing the page in an attempt to give the rest of the book a bit more life. Several months later, I realised that the so-called “offending photo” was actually also shown, in a much smaller size, on the book’s cover – and nobody had ever noticed, even though the breast wasn’t as blurry in that smaller size.

The Stage 2 students and I had a great time this week writing up their sports reports for the Beijing Olympics & Book Week 2008. They came to the library with their class teacher (who is brand new to rapping) – usually we’ve had two rotating groups instead, but with the industrial action of yesterday morning, there were lots of students still absent in the afternoon.

We went through the key elements of a newspaper sports report/article, using the supplied Rap Sheet, then read and analysed the “Kiwis vs Wallabies” report from The Shaggy Gully Times by Jackie French & Bruce Whatley. When it came time to break into writing groups, the students were highly motivated, and they were so empowered whenever they made up a clever pun. Of course, it really helped that one of the students was fresh off the plane from her recent visit to Beijing – and that the extremely fast gold-medal winning Jamaican athlete she told us about had the highly punny surname of Bolt!

By the way, it only occurred to us later why that Shaggy Gully football match was being played at night!

Yes, it’s been a a busy term, but traditionally Term Three always is in school libraries: Book Week, National Literacy & Numeracy Week, and all that.

Rap Point 2 stretched across two weeks this time, on purpose, and it was also okay to post a bit late, since each school in the rap tends to work at a different pace. There had been a few new schools only just starting to look around the pages and/or noticing the newer messages on earlier rap points.

I decided to concentrate on prediction that week. I like to get the students to anticipate what might be coming next, so we predicted how we would:
* find the rap blog, with which search terms (eg. on Google)
* recognise our post from last week (ie. look out for school crest avatar).

Also, we predicted the contents of the page of The Shaggy Gully Times we’d be reading in the rap session. I asked one group of students to make predictions as to what they’d see inside the local newspaper when I unrolled it (fresh from my front lawn). Local newspapers are a great free resource, and many times they only get noticed by the students when they are asked to clean out the budgies’ cage, or collect newspapers for covering school desks during art, or when making papier mache.

The students were very engaged in skimming the layout, quickly identifying and confirming almost all their predictions about the newspaper. The standard of talking and listening was very pleasing – they were perceptive, and supportive of each other’s earlier ideas.

I hope this is an activity they will be able to repeat with their parents. (And that the newspaper they choose doesn’t have too many full page ads for local attractions such as “Wild Boys Afloat”, etc.) Several students reported recently that they’d personally gone online and shown their parents the current rap blog on their home Internet computers. One girl said, “I even printed out the page that had my name and comment on it.”

Book Week is fast approaching!

Yesterday, 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, 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 is 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?

Sometimes I think it would be great to have a fish tank in the school library where I work. Fish tanks are so… calming. Well, that’s the theory. Usually, I manage to talk myself out of such a whimsy.

I had a large aquarium in my old library. The principal bought it, on a whim, from a casual relief janitor – and it functioned quite adequately for about a year. The students loved searching for the little “Where’s Wally?” toy (in his swimming ring, snorkle and goggles) which decorated the bottom of the tank. (That’s “Where’s Waldo?” for my US readers.)

We eventually lost the last of our first batch of goldfish, so I cleaned out the tank one Friday and had the new water circulating all weekend, ready to buy more fish.

Of course, when we came in on the Monday morning the tank was bone dry: the water had leaked through a faulty seam (weakened during my strenuous cleaning?), and saturated the carpet! We had a special event (visiting children’s author, Libby Gleeson) occurring in the library later in the week and we had to hire special air blowers to dry out the carpet in time. What a mess!

One six-week holiday, I put in a four-week food block to keep the fish happy for the time we’d be away from school. Someone said, “But what happens when the fish get hungry in the fifth week?”

I joked that “Of course, Survival of the Fittest” would be played out – and boy, did I feel bad when one poor goggle-eyed black moor got skeletonised.

Yesterday, a group of Stage 3 (Year 6) students met with me in three small groups, in the school library, to compile a Rap Response to the first Rap Point in the Identity Rap. We read some articles by some local Aboriginal educators and then the students had to discuss when they had returned to the house they’d lived in when they were younger, and to recall some well-worn phrases from parents and grandparents that continue to shape their identities, and that have become “messages for a good life”.

I can highly recommend Circle Time as a successful strategy for scribing the students’ fresh, unassuming responses to the stimulus material. They were delivering their grandparents’ sayings with such seriousness. (I was inwardly in hysterics by the spontaneity and honesty of their oral replies, and it was all I could do to hold the pencil steady as I scribed their warmly humorous answers.)

They said:

We will always remember these wise words:

“When cooking pikelets, don’t get too close to the pan.”

“Don’t jump on the couch.”

“Chew like a lady.”

“Never draw on people when they are asleep.”

“These things you should remember because I did it the hard way.”

“Always start the day with a good breakfast.”

“Study hard!”

“Never pick your nose in public.”

“Respect people, even if you dislike them.”

Wonderful stuff, eh?

I have an article about Circle Time in a recent issue of Scan. If you’re interested in following it up, the details are:
‘Circle time: maximising opportunities for talking and listening at Penrith Public School’in Scan 26(4) November 2007, pp 4-7.

Impromptu roleplays can be so much fun. This week, I have read/performed the big book version of The three billy goats gruff to nine Stage 1 and Early Stage 1 classes, as part of their term’s work on fairy and folk tales.

The last class, a Kindergarten, have just left. Towards the end of our collaboratively planned lesson, the class teacher had to run an errand and, having already looked at the CBCA shortlisted books display, I decided to return to our fairy tale roleplay ideas – and suddenly we had twenty-two “trolls” hiding under tables/bridges, awaiting the arrival of some “troll food”.

While waiting to chant the now-familiar phrase, “Who’s that crossing over my bridge?”, the trolls chattered amongst themselves…

“Gee, trolls must get tired of waiting.”

“That’s why they’re so mean.”

“Hey, someone drew under this table!”

“Trolls are very naughty, you know.”

“Where is she? I’m worried.”

“Maybe a troll ate her while she was outside?”

About this time, two “trolls” elected to come out from under their bridge and be contented grass-eating goats. Scapegoats, perhaps?

And then: “Who’s that crossing over MY bridge?”

The look on the trolls’ teacher’s face was precious! Too bad she’d actually missed all the hilarious commentary that her absence had instigated.

I think I’ve finally recovered from our Book Fair week; the whole school had directed a lot of energy at our annual Grandparents’ Day. Although my only contact with the grandparents this year was in the crush of the Book Fair, there were numerous events throughout the school, all well attended. Once again many of the staff observed that, these days, most of us are older than the average grandparent of a primary school student. Sigh…

As I was attempting to close up the Book Fair cabinets on Thursday morning, I had a last-minute request from a parent who’d been waiting on an automated payment to be made into her account so she could buy some books. Luckily, I’d mastered the art of EFTPOS this year, although the transaction ate into my morning preparations!

At the exact same time:

* a tech guy arrived to re-image two testy OASIS Enquiry kiosk terminals

* the locksmith turned up to repair both main entry doors to the library (they both jammed at the same time yesterday, effectively locking me out of the Book Fair (my Principal congratulated me on my excellent security practices: every window was also locked tight when he tried to gain entry via the burglars’ route, and…

before the desks and chairs could be restored to their usual arrangement…

* my first class turned up for the morning. Accompanied by a casual relief teacher, clutching English worksheets on procedural texts. Could I help model some recipes?

For the briefest moment, I almost hyperventilated. I wanted to run screaming from the room. (Ah, but we do have a Library Rule: “Please walk in the library”.)

“Yes, of course! I know just the resources we need” I said.

I reached for three big books in close proximity: one with recipes, one with science experiments and one with handicraft procedures. You know, it was the best team-taught, impromptu lesson I’ve done in ages!

Barely settling down in the staff room for coffee, I received a frantic message: the Book Fair men were here for the cabinets! Back to the library. And where was that recharging cord for the EFTPOS machine?

I realised today that I’d actually put together the following little piece last year, and it’s still quite valid.

Murphy’s Laws of School Book Fairs

1. First sale of the day – an 80 cent pencil – will inevitably be countered by a crisp $50 note.

2. If you put a signature on the item’s price sticker at a school book fair, in an attempt to prevent shoplifting, the child will inevitably have a single ten cent coin to pay for a $10 item. Or even a $25 item. (These students have expensive tastes. And a totally unrealistic idea of the value of money. They also believe that if you keep buying items that give you change, you’ll never run out of money.)

3. If a student hands you a bunch of 16 shiny $1 coins, and it looks like he raided Mum’s money box, he probably did. (And why was he so desperate to purchase a personal burglar alarm, anyway?)

4. If someone sees you sneaking a look at the EFTPOS machine manual, they’ll suddenly demand you test it out on their card. (”Please do use the Ready Teller across the road please, these instructions are too obscure, okay?”)

5. Of course, you’re supposed to charge up the EFTPOS machine the night before.

6. Stationery is still way more exciting than books, even on Day 3 of a Book Fair.

7. Tired teachers only make addition errors in front of the parents, not little students, who wouldn’t notice anyway.

8. Today’s grandparents are younger than most of the teachers. (Welcome to the middle ages.) But they are quite generous (Ka-ching! Ka-ching! – sound of cash register).

9. A major computer system changeover shall occur on the same day as the takings of the annual Book Fair must be finalised. It will also be the last day of term, and only one day before a public holiday. (We had to do a set of tasks to prepare for conversion to OASIS Thin Client in 2007 – seems like only yesterday, or decades ago.)

10. The final tearful request for a $1 scented eraser will be announced precisely ten minutes after the van, full of all the cabinets of product, leaves the school grounds. (A prediction: just you see if I’m right.)

If memory serves, I was.

Was it worth it? Sure, why not? Especially with 30% of sales being returned to us in books – some even being just-announced CBCA (Children’s Book Council of Australia) Awards shortlisted titles. But Thursday morning was a great example of a day that some people would see as a string of disasters, but others think of as a typical day in a school library. In some perverse way, it was fun and rewarding.

It’s been frantic at school this week: the annual Book Fair in our school library and today is the culmination, Grandparents’ Day!

I just had to share a wonderful moment from yesterday afternoon. One of the Year 1 students came racing into the library, wild-eyed – just as I was trying to slip away from the Book Fair for a quick lunchtime coffee.

“Mr McLean! Mr McLean!” he exclaimed, “There are some Bad Words out here, under the stairs.”

I’d noticed some chalked arrows on the steps earlier in the day, but I hadn’t thought to investigate further. Crouching down, I could see some choice four-letter words on a support beam of the stairs attached to our portable building.

“Well,” I reflected. “You’ll just have to make sure that you don’t read them until I can get them removed.”

“It’s okay, Mr McLean,” he said, beaming at me. “I can’t read!”

(The funny thing is, he’s quite a talented little reader.) It was just the release I needed towards the end of a tense day, topped off only by numerous parent visitors, getting a sneak preview of the Book Fair stock.

“My kid talks about the library all the time,” several of them said. “He/she just loves coming to this library!”

Yes, enough ego-boo to get me through Grandparents’ Day, I reckon.