Creating Stories with Preps

Tasmanian author Johanna Baker-Dowdell visits her son's classroom and inspires and leads the students into creating a wonderful story about a tiger and a puppet.

As a child, do you remember how thrilling it was to meet an adult whose job was something really special, like a singer, an artist or TV star?

When my youngest son, Ethan, started Prep this year he excitedly told me his class would focus on a specific author every few weeks. Everything excites him about school (which is great), but the idea of finding out more about an author really delighted him. I chuckled to myself and said, “I’m an author too.” He said, “I know mum. Why don’t you come to my class and talk to us?”

I wasn’t sure whether the classroom of five- and six-year-olds would be interested in hearing about how I wrote a business book, but I did think they would like to hear about how a story comes together. And so did their teacher.

Not quite sure how I was going to talk about storytelling with this group of 25-odd kids, I fell back on a trusted activity both my sons have enjoyed over the years and one I’ve started using myself when writing creatively – writing prompts.

I enlisted Ethan’s help and together we collected a box full of interesting prompts to kick-start even the most stubborn creative streak. Our box of goodies included: a flower, an autumn leaf, an Indian tiger puppet, a small wooden spoon, a ribbon, a pair of blue sunglasses, a gum nut, a round stone and a jigsaw puzzle piece.

Armed with my prompts, some butcher’s paper and coloured pens I shared the items with the class and we talked about how we could use what was in the box to create a story. Before long we had a central character (Rosie the tiger) and had filled three pages of paper with her story. I hadn’t planned on using all the items as prompts, but the kids were so excited and their ideas flowed so freely that we just kept going until every item had played a role in Rosie’s story.

The class was so enthusiastic that we extended the storytelling session. I placed a few items from the box on each group of desks and every child wrote their own story using these as prompts. Some used the characters we had created together and others started fresh with new characters, but every child created an individual story. A class full of engaged children all scribbling with their pencils on blank paper to create something unique was an honour to witness.

Their enthusiasm was contagious and I came back to my office to type up their class story, laying it out so each page could be accompanied with a picture. Within days Ethan proudly showed me the illustrated and bound story displayed in his classroom. You can read the text of the story online. 

Since then I’ve spoken with several of Ethan’s classmates at school pick up about the stories they have written. And one wants to be a Star Wars author when he grows up! Parents also told me how excited their children were to write a story together, so I’m chalking that up as an inspiring experience – for all of us.

Johanna Baker-Dowdell
Freelance journalist and author of the book Business & Baby on Board.

Blog: http://johannabd.com/

Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JohannaBakerDowdell

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohannaBD    
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johanna.BakerDowdell

Using Magazines to Engage Reluctant Readers

This week, Helen Rothwell discusses her journey to engage the reluctant readers in her class.

My upper primary class has 20 minutes of daily designated reading time. We mix it up with individual reading time, reading to and with a buddy, pairing with an early childhood class and reading in small groups from a set text. Now my students are engaged in their reading, for most of the time, but it did not happen instantly. It took time for me to work on engaging my small number of reluctant readers.

My reluctant readers were students who, for a variety of reasons, did not find reading an activity that was enjoyable or had value for them. This may be because they do not have an atmosphere at home where they see adults reading, are not exposed to a variety of reading material outside school or they have the irresistible lure of computer games and other activities to keep them occupied. Some students think that reading happens at school and once they are outside school their time is their own and reading is an activity that is intrinsically linked to working at school.

A child can be a reluctant reader regardless of their proficiency as a reader. I have had students who are assessed as an independent reader, a goal many have from a young age. It is like the Holy Grail of reading ability – to be an independent reader; someone who is at level 30+. Of course, a reading level is just a ‘marker’. The important information gleaned from testing is the fluency, inferential and summarising skills, understanding of vocabulary and self-awareness they have stopped making meaning from the text. The problem with students knowing their reading level is that once they reach the classification of being independent they feel the reading journey has finished.

Reluctant readers can also be the students who are behind their peers in reading ability and keenly feel they are separate; that they are lacking and this affects their confidence to try to read books that will extend their skills. They develop a mindset of not being good enough: “What’s the point in trying when I can’t read a chapter book?” It is difficult to change this mindset.

To address this issue, my class has guided reading time where I work with small groups on the features of non-fiction texts. I explain that a non-fiction text is about five levels higher than its fiction equivalent because of the specific vocabulary that is used. One of the guided reading rotations is buddy reading a science, geography or history book.

Having a variety of texts is important but so is the way the material is presented. Some students prefer reading from an iPad or on the computer. Picture books are wonderful for all ages, not just the younger readers. The Children’s Book Council has helped to demystify the picture book as being aimed at young readers, making the genre accessible and attractive to older readers too. So trying all of the above my number of reluctant readers diminished to only two students. Hmm, so what to do now?

MAGAZINES! I bought issues of ‘HistoriCool’ and the CSIRO magazine ‘Scientriffic’. I sat with my reluctant readers and we flicked through the magazines, pointing out interesting pictures or funny captions, familiar diagrams and our own text-to-self experiences from our connection with snippets in the magazines. Sometimes the text was too difficult, sometimes too technical but both magazines have cartoons, puzzles, games and quizzes to balance the more serious articles. Reluctant reader count = zero!

So, please give serious consideration to having a magazine subscription for your library or classroom and if you already have these to hand, an occasional reminder to students that they are available. As well as engaging the reluctant reader through their curiosity, it is rewarding for all parties when they willingly go to pick up a text and read.

Helen Rothwell is a grade 5/6 teacher in a government school. 

Busman’s Holiday Reading

Attending conference/literary events (in this case Reading Matters) is one of the best incentives to reduce my TBR pile. 

Sally Garner is prolific yet each book is in a different style or genre. Her newest YA book since the dystopian Maggot Moon; The Door That Led to Where, is a blend of mystery, historical fiction, time travel and modern gritty contemporary life. AJ is a lost, aimless yet intelligent, school leaver whose friendship with his mates Slim and Leon sustain him when his mother rejects him.

 

Jared Thomas’s Calypso Summer had sat on my shelf for so long, it’s sun damaged. The novel starts slowly. Calypso is a cricket loving young Nukunu man masquerading as a Rastafarian who gradually comes to terms with his identity and his culture.

In Erin Gough’s Flywheel, 17 year old Delilah runs her father’s café while he is overseas. She loves the flamenco dancer in the restaurant across the road, has a wonderful platonic relationship with the wealthy romantic Charlie and has a misunderstanding with her best friend Lauren.

In Sara Farizan’s If You Could Be Mine, we meet Sahar, an intelligent and ambitious teenager in love with her best friend Nasrin. Being gay is illegal in Iran. The Iranian government sees transgender people as a mistake made by God and so government sponsored gender reassignment surgery is common. I found the two girls totally unlikeable yet somehow Farizan made me want to read more of her work.

Other Reading Matters highlights include hearing about the interactive making of the wonderful TV series Nowhere Boys (watch the series trailer) and talking to Claire Saxby, whose new book My Name is Lizzie Flynn: A Story of the Rajah Quilt should be in every Tasmanian library. 

Evocatively illustrated by Lizzy Newcomb, the Rajah Quilt was made by some of the women convicts aboard the convict ship Rajah which arrived in Hobart on 19 July 1841. The quilt was presented to Lady Franklin the governor's wife. The quilt was lost for many years and is now housed at the National Gallery of Australia. This wonderful book recounts an important story in Tasmania's history. More importantly we see a glimpse into the lives of women and children convicts.

On another leg of my holiday I visited the Colin Thiele exhibition at the Lu Rees Archives and accompanying lecture 'Colin Thiele: His Work and Legacy'. A video recording can be accessed and viewed on the Lu Rees website.

Nella Pickup
Reader and former librarian

(Editor's note: Apologies for inconsistent layout - no solution can be found!)

Children’s books: Bridges for peace

It was Jella Lepman who first used the phrase a bridge of children’s books. She was working with children in war-destroyed Germany, and appealed to other countries to send donations of their best books. The German children needed these imported books in the 1940s, because recently they had been fed only Nazi propaganda. Jella Lepman realised the books from other countries were forming bridges that linked their lives with those in other lands. Lepman’s work resulted in the foundation of IBBY (the International Board on Books for the Young), which flourishes today in more than seventy countries.

How do these book-bridges build foundations for peace? Readers who experience a wide and deep range of stories develop empathy – the ability to live for a while in another’s skin. One of the most valuable and practical ways to help a child become empathetic is through hearing and reading stories about diverse lives.

Babies and toddlers need books in which they recognise children similar to themselves, preferably in the child’s mother tongue. Then, gradually, books can expand the lives of their readers. Adults with influence—parents, teachers, librarians – can and should introduce books set in varied societies, in other places and times. It may be a matter of meeting Indigenous Australian lives in books, such as the outstanding picture books When I Was Little Like You by Mary Malbunka, and Remembering Lionsville by Bronwyn Bancroft; or in novels such as Crow Country by Kate Constable and Nona and Me by Clare Atkins. And books transport us to places as diverse as Morocco in Jeannie Baker’s beautiful Mirror; or Ghana in the easy-to-read adventure Figgy in the World by Tamsin Janu.

There are some excellent books about the now too-common predicament of people forced to become refugees. Australian picture books too good to miss on this topic include Ziba Came on a Boat by Lofthouse and Ingpen; Shaun Tan’s now-classic The Arrival; and the breathtaking newly-published Flight by Wheatley and Greder. My Two Blankets by Kobald and Blackwood depicts the life of a girl who has reached a country like Australia and must learn a new language, a new way of living. And no child should miss Bob Graham’s masterpiece about multicultural community-building, A Bus Called Heaven.

Another kind of ‘otherness’ that is represented sensitively in children’s books today is that of disability. Examples are Two Mates by Melanie Prewett and Maggie Prewett; and Roses are Blue by Sally Murphy (for primary age), and Are You Seeing Me? by Darren Groth (Young Adult).

And here in our Anglophone nation we can neglect the importance of translated books, ranging from the imaginative Finnish world of the Moomins to Lindelauf’s Nine Open Arms, a warm, eccentric family story from the Netherlands.

Books can make a difference in dispelling prejudice and building community: not with role models and literal recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives of others. A good story lets you know people as individuals in all their particularity and conflict; and once you see someone as a person—flawed, complex, striving —then you've reached beyond stereotype (Rochman, 1993, p. 19).

There are many other wonderful books for all ages that help us ‘imagine the lives of others.’ If we work at introducing the best books to young people, we are working to build bridges for peace.

Rochman, H. 1993. Against borders: Promoting books for a multicultural world American Library Association.

Dr Robin Morrow AM
National President of IBBY Australia, Robin recently delivered the inaugural 'Book Links Lecture' in the Queensland State Library, entitled Reading the wider world: Books as bridges for young readers. Here she argues that book-bridges can help build peace. A fitting springboard to engage with the Community Festival for Peace this week in northern Tasmania.

Literary Travels

Penny Garnsworthy, the CBCA Tas newsletter editor, takes us to some of the places in the United Kingdom that are linked with children’s books.

I recently spent some time in the UK and included on my list of things to see and do were attractions of a literary nature.

In Edinburgh I visited the statue of Sherlock Holmes, located near the birthplace of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then I lunched at The Conan Doyle, a fabulous pub decorated in the style you would expect from Holmes himself. In London I visited the 221B Baker Street premises of Sherlock Holmes, now a museum full of Holmes memorabilia. It has the famously furnished upstairs room where Holmes and Watson spent their days mulling over mysteries and next door there is even a café called Mrs Hudson’s Restaurant.

In northern England, I spent a day at Alnwick Castle where Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was filmed. Evidence of this is all around in the plethora of Harry Potter souvenirs available in the castle’s shops together with the daily broomstick-riding lessons where children and adults alike cavort on the castle green led by an appropriately dressed witch and wizard.

But it wasn’t just the fun and frivolity of fiction I was interested in. As a lover of ancient history, there was one very important piece of literature I just had to see; The Rosetta Stone, which is now housed in the British Museum.

The Rosetta Stone features two translations of the same decree in the three scripts that were common in ancient Egypt at the time; hieroglyphic, Greek and Demotic. It dates back to 196BC and was discovered in 1799. Nobody had ever been able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs but in 1822 Frenchman Jean Francois Champollion, who could read both Greek and Coptic, finally did it and the rest, as they say, is history.

Cheers, Penny

Catching Your Eye – What to Read Next?

                                                           Warning: phrase overload!

Many would be familiar with the phrase ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’ and be able to think of books to which it relates. The phrase is appealing to readers to not be judgemental as to the content and quality of a book by looking at the cover alone. 

To take the time to read and linger on the story before casting it aside based on external factors. I, however, often find this difficult to do and in working in school libraries note that many children and young adults pick up a possible book to read solely on the cover design followed by a quick turnover to the blurb on the back. Even though we know that ‘All that glitters is not gold’, the overall look, presentation and feel of a book is a high determinant in attracting readers to it in the first place. 

Children and young adults are very visual and it is important to encourage them to remember: ‘If you judge a book by its cover, you might miss out on an amazing story.’ However, with the limited resources of families, schools and libraries, books that are initially unappealing, regardless of what lies within, may not be purchased or presented in the first place. 

A poorly designed book sitting on a shelf, without promotion or recommendation, is likely to stay that way - unread. In sourcing and recommending literature for children the whole package must be considered: a quality, literary work encased in a well bound, appealing cover. 

NB:  Cover images used in this article are of books that ‘caught my eye’ and I subsequently enjoyed.

Tricia Scott
Teacher Librarian and current Tasmanian Judge for Children’s Book of the Year Awards

Imagining the Unimaginable

Lyndon Riggall discusses the qualities of good writing that enable us to put ourselves as close as possible to the daunting theatre of war.

Reading Carol Fuller’s recent blog, brought to us from the stunning and heart-wrenching Gallipoli Peninsula (link: http://cbcatas.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/anzac-day-at-gallipoli-peninsula_26.html), I was struck by her examination of the difference between “commemoration” and “celebration” and particularly her request that those who still believe that Anzac day is a cause for celebration read from the Mud and Blood and Tears list available from CBCA Tasmania. The reason the comments struck me was that I, like many of my generation and the ones that have come after, no longer have living relatives from either of the World Wars, and as such have accessed experiences of it primarily through the written word: first-hand accounts; poetry and, of course, fiction. When I lower my head in remembrance it is the relatives long gone who I think of first, but in imagining what they went through, my mind, for better or worse, also conjures images from stories: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Morris Gleitzman’s Once… novels, Jackie French’s Pennies for Hitler, Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse or Michelle Magorian’s incomparably upsetting Goodnight, Mister Tom. And who could forget, once read, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a novel that says so much in so few pages about who we are as people, and how we must treat each other?

It would be a rare year that the CBCA didn’t recognise at a high level a work of fiction that dealt intensely with the causes, consequences and conflict of one of the major world wars. It has sometimes been a criticism of book prizes that the theme of war might dazzle a reader into an emotional response as a form of misdirection--hiding clichés and poor writing behind heavy themes and emotionally traumatic events. I would argue that although writing poorly about war is a terrible crime against history, the writers who write about war successfully are largely thoroughly deserving of the accolades that they receive. Writing about conflict--particularly for a young audience, who often know even less of the realities of death and war than adults--in a way that inspires empathy and understanding--that feels true--is a herculean task. Whether it is a particular author’s “right” or “place” to discuss these topics is not something that I want to debate here, but I think perhaps that we can agree that attempting to do so, when successful, is vital to the way that many of us understand the past, engage with the potential conflicts of the future, and remember the great sacrifices made by real families on both sides of conflict. 

Writers who have the gift of being able to present ideas of war with integrity allow us to try and imagine the unimaginable. Although we may never succeed in fully appreciating the sacrifices that have been made in the past, I believe it is our duty to try. In language; in words and images and stories, we come perhaps as close as we are going to get to truly understanding what happened. On Anzac Day here in Australia we stand and say “Lest We Forget,” but perhaps we need to do more than that. We need to imagine. Doing so--even when we cannot possibly hope to touch the truth of the horror and tragedy and sadness of what happened--is to see that this is not a cause for celebration. In placing ourselves in one of humanity’s darkest hours through the skills of great writers, perhaps we leave with resolve. Perhaps we make a promise, in our own hearts, and perhaps that promise enters the world through our actions. And that promise is this:

Never again.

Lyndon Riggall
Author and former Tasmanian Book of the Year Judge

In Praise of Libraries

Maureen Mann presents this week’s Blog. Maureen was the recipient of the 2006 Tasmanian Teacher Librarian of the Year Award and in 2008 was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Membership of the Tasmanian Branch of the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA), for her tireless work with children’s literature.

While reflecting on what to write, now that my blog responsibility has come around again and thinking that I would do something other than my usual commentary on what I have read, I visited my grandson’s local library. He lives in an ethnically diverse part of greater Toronto in Canada.

It’s part of a vibrant forward-thinking library organisation with several branches. Walk into a bright, welcoming environment where the stock is up-to-date and appropriate for the cultural needs of the community, across all ages. I picked up a 24-page booklet full of ideas for everyone – kids, teens, adults, newcomers as well as long-term residents. The summer reading program for children, just about to get under way, includes prizes for the school with the most enrolments. For teens, the challenge of collectively reading two million pages together and then creating a book trailer for the preferred book(s). Of course, these can be e-books not just paper versions. There’s an invitation to go on a blind date with a book; a brown-paper-wrapped title with no clue apart from a genre suggestion. Magazines are available for free download and there is access for music downloads. The central branch has a professional 3D printer, apparently the only one so far available in a public institution in Canada. 

So after a very positive visit I started thinking about the inappropriate stereotypes still promulgated about libraries. Let’s look at a few:

·      Staff, who are old women with buns going: “Shhhhhhh!” No. Staff are often young and hate the idea of silence around them.

·      Dark and musty spaces. No. well-patronised and successful libraries are bright, airy, warm environments where all members of the community are welcomed.

·      Old, out-of-date stock. No. Modern readers expect the best of the most recent publications, whether in electronic or traditional formats.

·      Only readers need to visit. No. Everyone is welcomed in an environment where all information needs are catered for using all kinds of technologies, whether traditional paper or the most advanced developments, such as 3D printers.

·      Libraries are superseded by Google and the like. No. Libraries support this technology especially for those who don’t have the skills to access and assess the wealth of information now available.

·      Libraries don’t need support. No. Many members of the community see the library as an essential for their environment but forget that to maintain them the funding bodies need to be given that message. The best way to do this is to visit and use your local library very regularly. 

I happened upon a great article from The Rotarian magazine – and, no, not because I am a Rotarian. http://therotarianmagazine.com/in-praise-of-libraries. The article and the resultant comments make for thoughtful reading.

For fun support of libraries have a look at this online poem from Scroobius Pip, a spoken word poet and hip hop artist. http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/scroobius-pip-crafts-poem-in-praise-of-libraries/95423

What do libraries mean to you? How can we get rid of the unacceptable stereotypes? We’d love to hear your views.