Here we go! More Stage 2 Powerpoint presentations of “Bear & Chook” adventures, created from storyboards during PSP literacy sessions:
Earlier examples are here.
This term, groups of Stage 2 students at my school have worked with me, during our PSP literacy sessions, to create and upload Powerpoint presentations of the “Bear & Chook” adventures, explanations and procedures they wrote up as storyboards.
For example:
We hope that other schools enjoy their work as much as we enjoyed creating them.
Using the many clever functions of PowerPoint this term has been my own steep learning curve! Today, with only five minutes left of the lesson, and as a Stage 3 class descended upon us from across the playground (library bags at the ready), one group of eager Year 3 students was guessing how to add a series of pale, white, special-effect curved lines to one of their sequences of photos. And we did it! Exhilarating!
At my school, it’s been a long tradition that every class prepares a Book Week display for the library. The displays, either 2D or 3D, stay up until just before the next Book Week, and help the library to be a colourful and fun environment. Here are our displays to celebrate Book Week 2009. Theme: “Book Safari”. Click photos to see bigger versions.
Collecting colour by SCLB
“Book Safari” culture pod by SCHM - “It’s culture – in a pith helmet!”
Every picture tells a story by 6P
Nobody owns the moon by 4/5M
Puffling by KFM
Pull to see 1C
“Book Safari” poster by 4W
Tuart dwellers by 1S
How weird is that… by 2CH
The wizard of Rondo by 5/6D
Sunday Chutney by KB
The big book of happy sadness by 3G
Tom Tom by 2KS
“Book Safari” tree by 3M
How to heal a broken wing by KI
“Book Safari” decorated box by 5B
“Leaf” by SCHC
Shoot animals with a camera, not a gun! by 6W
Safari print balloons
First day of Term 3, yesterday. Bear and Chook have moved into
our school library and made themselves right at home!
Stage 2 students will be working with them this term.
Book Week is fast approaching!
Over on the OZTL_Net listserv, a teacher-librarian asked for ideas for getting students more involved with the annual Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) awards. While there are other, student-voted, literary awards out there (eg. KOALA – Kids’ Own Australian Literature Awards), the CBCA “books of the year” are selected by adult judges, so sometimes the students can feel left out of the judging procedure.
It’s not difficult to lead discussion with students as to what are valuable criteria for judging children’s literature. Some categories are easier for students to judge, because they are within the intended audience of certain books. With guidance, Year 6 students can still make incisive observations about what makes a good picture book for younger students. You can also deconstruct the actual rules used by the CBCA judges.
This is the third year I’ve organised CBCA voting with students this way:
* K-2 (Early Stage 1; Stage 1) are judging Picture Books and Early Childhood Books
* Years 3-4 (Stage 2) are judging Picture Books and Information Books
* Years 5-6 (Stage 3) are judging Picture Books and Novels for Younger Readers.
I supply two empty bar graph grids per student, with the titles written at the base of each column. As we read and appreciate the books, in any order, they give points out of ten and colour their graphs. When all six bars of the graph are filled in, the highest columns are declared the winners and the students record their predictions. They find it very tricky if they’ve voted “ten out of ten” for two or more titles in a category. When Book Week arrives we fill in the actual winners beside their own choices.
At my previous schools, we’ve usually done a show-of-hands voting on a class column graph, but individual voting seems to enthuse the students even more. There’s usually a lot of clapping and cheering when I announce the winners at the school assembly in Book Week.
I recall really impressing one principal, in my first year as a teacher-librarian. She said, “I’ve never heard these children cheer for a book before…!” – and a few days later there was lots more money in my library budget.
“Pete the Sheep”
The annual National Simultaneous Storytime happened today at 11am: “Pete the Sheep” by Jackie French & Bruce Whatley, as a PowerPoint presentation on my school’s new interactive whiteboard! Thanks ALIA for a fun event!
It’s time to update my post on reorganising my library nooks, one for Premier’s Reading Challenge (PRC) titles – needing a comfy couch – and another for highlighting new titles – requiring some bright signage!
I finally cajoled a friend with a truck to bring my spare two-seater couch from my front veranda (at home), and then I bought a box of purple Dylon dye to change the colour of an old navy blue and beige lounge throw-over. (In fact, I dyed two matching covers, so I could have cushion covers made for the seating area, since the cover itself often slides off when people slump into the couch.)
Why purple? Well, I still didn’t know what colour to make our main wall, but the library owns an original Kim Gamble artwork in gorgeous pastels, and the professional mounting and frame are mauve and purple, so it was important to decorate around this feature.
The dye job worked perfectly. On the way home from the city the other night, I found this wonderful Tigger cushion for $15, marked down from $30 (and with a $45 price tag underneath):
I’m thrilled with the way the couch has turned out! The colour match the picture frame perfectly. Now our Stage 2 and Stage 3 PRC titles are with easy grasp of a relaxing place to browse them.
Meanwhile, I spent the school holidays painting and lacquering some more MDF letters to identify the “NEW” titles (in yellow), and the library’s pink “J” (”Junior”) and green “F” (”Fiction”) sections. The left and right “rocket” arrows are actually wooden doorknob hanger signs, templates intended for craft projects. I used old dustjackets to find appropriate book characters to “drive” the rockets, appearing in the hole normally filled by a doorknob.
Scattered across the “NEW” titles’ shelves are some die-cut “It’s new” signs. $4 for a packet of ten. My reasoning is that “NEW” shelves are often quickly denuded, so at least the signage will keep the area colourful until the shelves can be restocked.
Racing past the venerable, old Mitchell Wing of the State Library of New South Wales yesterday, I simply had to stop and take some snaps of “Matthew and Trim”, featured characters in a great graphic novel I read to my Stage 2 students last term.
Now that the Beijing Olympics & Book Week 2008 rap has come to a conclusion, I decided to select a variety of extracts from my groups’ rap responses (sports articles, a few photos, a wrap rap up message) and combined them as a mini-newspaper (double-sided A4, folding down to make a simple four-paged booklet of The Shaggy Penrith Times), which will slip inside our school newsletter tomorrow. Price = three carrots.
The back cover of the booklet explains the educational parameters of this rap, shows a frame grab from the blog, and gives URLs for both the NSW DET rap blog site, and our own Library wiki pages, encouraging our parents and caregivers to look at the students’ work online.
It didn’t take me very long – but a wombat probably could have done it faster (see The Shaggy Gully Times by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley). An efficient way of communicating with the parents, and giving them access to further information!
A brochure that came out to promote National Reading Day – 3 September 2008 suggested doing something similar online, or in hardcopy, and that was always in the back of my mind as we added things to the school wiki pages, but it’s only now the rap is over I found time to dig back through the archives. Of course, schools needed to have registered between 3rd and 7th September, when the rapping schools were all deep into the rap! Maybe next year?
I have such a fondness for Jack. For once I don’t mean Jack, my Jack Russell terrier. I mean Jack, the charming, hilarious, resilient boy at the heart of Susanne Gervay’s very important children’s novel, “I Am Jack”.
I was fortunate enough to be given this book to review for the teacher-librarian’s journal, Scan, in 2000. It was in a stack of about fifteen assorted new books, but it just stood out. First of all, the intriguing cover (as below) was at once bright yet ominous, and, within a few pages of reading, I was rallying to the cause of its appealing protagonist – who goes from lovable, normal, happy-go-lucky kid, to unexpected victim, to proud and empathetic victor, throughout the course of the book. The story really touched the heartstrings. It was probably no surprise, bumping into the author at a literary function some months later, that I learned how much autobiographical truth there was in “I Am Jack”. Susanne and her son, whom I also met at another function, bravely shared their true story of playground bullying so that other children might be empowered.
A few years later, in my role of editor of Scan, I worked with a school team of educators who’d used Susanne’s book with students, and wanted to share their journey and results in the journal. The Scan article went through quite a long consultative process. Crossing over several Key Learning Areas as it did, and being about such a sensitive issue as bullying, it was so important that the article – not to mention the teaching notes, and my interview with Susanne) would cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s (or is that cross all the eyes?). The article(s) eventually appeared in Scan 21(3) August 2002.
A few weeks ago, I heard that “I Am Jack” had been turned into a play for schools. By coincidence, Susanne and I had just found each other again – this time on Facebook, and she gave me some days and venues. It had already been playing relatively close by: at Parramatta, but I’d missed that. In a panic, I realised that all of these other times were for weekdays. Drat. Except today… 2pm. If I felt like getting myself to Campbelltown.
Or I could wait until its return season… Next year. D’oh!
The radio was warning about a blazing hot day but I decided that, if there was no railway track maintenance when I checked the online timetables this morning, and if I could leave it till after 10.00am before I left the house (having confirmed with the box office that there were some tickets left), then I’d venture off to the unknown wilderness that is Campbelltown to see the play.
Timing worked out perfectly. After two longish train legs, and a leisurely walk from Campbelltown Station, past lots of intriguing shops I was sure I’d never get back to, to the beautiful Arts Centre, I was there in plenty of time to have lunch!
At about 1.50 pm, I wandered over to the theatre area and there was Susanne signing copies of “I Am Jack”. It was great to see her again. Her fellow authors, Di Bates and Bill Condon, both of who I knew well from my early days as a teacher-librarian, ended up sitting next to me – another happy reunion – and I also got to meet the real “Rob”, template for fictional Jack’s gregarious and supportive future step-Dad in “I Am Jack”.
How to describe the set? It’s a one-actor tour de force, with Tim McGarry (pictured above, photo by Terry Moore) portraying Jack and ten supporting characters, surrounded by oversized, scribbled-on furniture that at once recaptures Cathy Wilcox’s unique illustrations in the book, and makes Tim McGarry the size of an eleven-year-old schoolboy!
Tim had an array of wonderful shorthand mimes to cue the audience as to which supporting character would be appearing next. Feeble Nanna playing “Uno” against Jack was a hoot, as was Rob driving the car, one hand on the wheel. Also amazing was Jack playing handball against unseen opponents, without a tennis ball being thrown.
The anti-bullying message is crystal clear, both in the book and the play: it can happen to anyone, at any time; bullies isolate someone, in order to improve their own sense of power, and they can peck away at whatever self-esteem the victim has/had until he or she is further and further isolated from the very people who could have helped; it takes the whole group to stand firm against bullying, so it’s a change of culture that will affect a change in behaviour.
The play concluded with a question-and-answer session with Tim and Susanne. Apart from some perceptive questions about bullying and writing by the young audience, a real hit, prop-wise, was Jack’s amazing science experiment: the ponto in its glass jar: an onion grafted onto a potato, which has seemingly successfully sprouted and may, one day, make Jack a fortune as an impossible hybrid plant! Amazingly, the play’s ponto was made from plastic vegetables bought from a two-dollar shop by the Monkey Baa propmaster. (You know what? I want one!)
After that, Susanne invited a group of us back to the Arts Centre’s cafe for coffee. Even though they were “closing in ten minutes”, I’m sure we got in a good twenty extra minutes of gossiping.
I had such a great day. It was well worth the long commute.
So, if you notice that “I Am Jack” is coming to a theatre near you, or if you know anyone who has ever bullied, or been bullied, this play is one to see! And, in the meantime, read the book. Or its excellent sequel, “Super Jack”.
