A famous literary mouse adventurer, Scholastic’s Geronimo Stilton, dropped by our book fair today, to see how his royalties were faring.
Category Archives: news
Book trailers for Book Week
The students and I have begun to explore some book trailers, both official and student-created, for the CBCA shortlisted books of 2012:
The last Viking book trailer – Norman Jorgensen & James Foley
The golden door book trailer – Emily Rodda
Rudie nudie book trailer – Emma Quay
Here’s a persuasive digital slideshow questioning whether the Tasmanian thylacine is really extinct:
Compare this Youtube video clip to the picture book, “The dream of the thylacine” by Margaret Wild & Ron Brooks.
Celebrating National Simultaneous Storytime
Today, our whole school participated in the annual ALIA National Simultaneous Storytime with a reading of Nick Bland’s “The very cranky bear”.
The hearing support unit used a Youtube presentation in Auslan. It was so well done that, after I’d read the book to the Stage 1 group who’d used the school library as their venue today, we decided to play the Auslan performance as well.
National Simultaneous Storytime is an eagerly-anticipated annual event!
The very cranky bear at 11am
Don’t forget that the picture book “The very cranky bear” by Nick Bland is today’s annual ALIA National Simultaneous Storytime title!
Have fun, everyone!
The very cranky bear – Auslan version
The very cranky bear
Vale Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)
“And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are…”
Eeeek! More puppets – enough, enough?
The chick puppet (above left) was probably originally a duckling, too, but when I found a different duckling (right) a few months later, I sewed the beak of the first one into a point.
An assortment of puppets from Taronga Park Zoo’s souvenir shop.
Emu and kangaroo puppets: Australia’s coat of arms!
Students at school helped to display the (now-huge) puppet collection!
Now we just need to complete that puppet theatre.
What’s cookin’?
Any idea what’s bubbling away on my cooktop? I’m dyeing two customised puppets!
And this becomes…
… this!
Yes, they are a pair of customized puppets, now dried in the washing machine spin-drier. The completed bat has wings cut from brown felt and the new eyes are flat beads in a pink plastic, Supaglued over the original black giraffe eyes. 50 cents for a packet containing lots (of future replacement eyes?) I love bargain shops!
The panther’s eyes are some teardrop-shaped yellow plastic “jewels”, originally bought for a different project. The only reason for turning a tiger into a panther was to give the bat a dunking buddy, and use up the leftover dye.
These two new additions (above) look rather sedate after the cooking pot episode!
SLA NSW Awards Celebration, 2012
Ian McLean, Stacey Taylor, guest speaker Maurice Saxby, Paul Macdonald and Alinda Sheerman at the School Libraries Association, NSW Awards at The Children’s Bookshop, Beecroft, last night. Paul is the proprietor of the shop… and so much more! He was receiving the inaugural Maurice Saxby Award.
The John H Lee Memorial Award is for a teacher-librarian who demonstrates “excellence in leadership in innovative and collaborative teaching practice through the integration of learning technologies”. Presented to yours truly. Many thanks to Linda Gibson-Langford who nominated me! This is a joint award presented by SLA NSW and Charles Sturt University. Ashley Freeman presented me with the award.
Uncle Al Cameron, Ian McLean, Aunty Pat Cameron and my special guest, Janette Mercer, who was my inspirational primary school teacher-librarian at Arncliffe Public School in the 1960s.
Maurice Saxby is sharing a poem, chosen at random, from a well-loved book he received at age five. Captivating! (Even the bear was mesmerised.) Maurice described that magic moment where a child is immersed in reading and suddenly gets a cold chill at the back of the neck. CS Lewis called this unique sensation “Surprise by joy.”
Teacher-librarian Jenny Scheffers (Caddies Creek Public School), Ian McLean and the School Libraries & Information Literacy Unit’s Colleen Foley at The Children’s Bookshop. Book rappers extraordinaire!
More puppets! It’s an obsession!
Bargain basement animal puppets at $3 each from The Reject Shop, Penrith Plaza. Not sure why the Dalmatian has a yellow nose. I originally rejected these four puppets as my least favourites, but at just $3 each they made a hard bargain to pass up.
More cute animal puppets, this time from the online Sunshine Markets, Queensland. The parcel arrived today! These were an irresistible Internet find: crocodile, leopard and (what the online catalogue called) “the Big Good Wolf”. Really? With those eyes?
Humpty was pushed?
Our school has had a Humpty Dumpty mural on a classroom wall for many years now. It’s amazing how fast Humpty falls again when the three-year cyclic plan for K-2 comes around again.
As is traditional, the “Chicks R Us” and their incubator turned up this week. Only one egg to hatch now!
Meanwhile, the students suggested that a PowerPoint show about the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, made three years ago, needed one more image to make it more interesting. So, this year, Easter egg Humpty shows some leakage after falling off his wall:
