Stories That May Help with Transition to School

Starting school, whether in the early years or the beginning of high school, can be a challenging time. Felicity Sly kicks off the blog for 2026  with some great suggestions for books that tackle starting school. 

This post it probably a tad late for helping Kinder and Prep children approach their first day at school, but a follow up story to normalise how they may be feeling about all the new experiences may help to ease their worries.

Spot Goes to School by Eric Hill (Penguin) is the confident, no worries approach. With nearly every lift-the-flap reveal, Spot is having a great experience…only singing seems to cause anxiety (perhaps this isn’t Spot’s experience, but Eric’s?).

In contrast The Pigeon HAS to go to School by Mo Willems (Penguin Random House) has Pigeon catastrophising every possible scenario…until they finally realises that school is there to help them learn all the things that they are worried about.

Maddie’s First Day by Penny Matthews & Liz Anelli (Walker Books) and First Day by Andrew Daddo & Jonathan Bentley (Harper Collins) take the reader through all the steps of getting ready on that first school day.  Maddie’s journey takes us through the school day, but Daddo’s child’s story skips what happens during the day and then focuses on it being mum who finds the day to be a challenge (one that will get easier tomorrow).

Ozzie Goes to School by Jocelyn Crabb & Danny Snell (Harper Collins) takes a completely different perspective. Ozzie has been living a non-typical life in the Northern Territory. His days are spent helping his dad. Ozzie struggles to cope with the new experiences at school and so runs away each day. But each morning he returns to school and with the help of understanding teachers and classmates by Friday, he is running to school.

Starting Year 7 can be as confronting for some students as starting Kinder/Prep.

Are You There Buddha by Pip Harry (Hachette Australia) a CBCA Book of the Year Younger Reader’s in 2020 (written in verse) has Bee attending a new school, with a new family dynamic and many personal and environment challenges to navigate. How Bee handles these challenges, through conversations with Buddha and her family provide the story’s trajectory. 

Stand Up Ferran Burke by Steve Camden (Pan Macmillan Australia) is also in verse. This novel is set over 5 years as Ferran commences high school and navigates this experience, no longer in his older sibling’s shadow. The book is set in Canada, but Canadians are honorary Australians (aren’t they?).

Tremendous Things by Susin Nielsen (Penguin Random House) commences in Grade 9 but references a humiliating Grade 7 event that still haunts Wilbur. Wilbur’s friends help him to rise above his worst moment and embrace new challenges. (This is another novel set in Canada).

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Bloomsbury) tells the tale of many Grade 7s experiencing major change, as they navigate the next stage of their education – amongst other challenges of just staying alive! The characters experience all the difficulties of school, peers, teachers and change.

You Must be Layla by Yassmin Abdel-Magied (Penguin) explores an even greater challenge in navigating the high school experience. Layla, a Sudanese-Australian Muslim and scholarship student in a prestigious high school, needs to prove that she is academically worthy, whilst navigating all the normal challenges of high school student…and more.

NCACL (National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature) has a Bibliography on this topic, listed in 3 sections: Pre-school and Ages 5-8; Primary/Upper Primary; and Secondary. Download the PDF here.

Felicity Sly is a CBCA Tasmania 2026 Committee Member, and an avid (but slow) reader.

A Stocking Full of Christmas

Our last post for 2025 highlights the wonders of our digital world in celebrating Christmas. Dip inside for some fun and frolics, sit back and enjoy the viewing. Note that some of these tales are advertisements or start with ads, some are for the very young, and at the bottom of the stocking are one or two for a more mature audience - just a bit cheeky. 

Ho! Ho! Ho: Where's the play button?

Mog's Christmas Calamity - Judith Kerr 

Christmas Eve with Kipper

Kipper the Dog | Season 3 Full Episode | Kids Cartoon Show

Paddington gets locked out on Christmas Day 

Bear Stays Up

Christmas holiday stories read aloud (Read Aloud books for children)

Jingle Bells with Adorable Kittens! 

Orange Cat Scully Becomes an Elf to Help Save Christmas

The Night Before Christmas

This Christmas Night
[AI Music Video]

The Magical Tale of Santa’s Reindeer

Animated Christmas Story for Kids

Edgar the Dragon 

in joint John Lewis and Waitrose Christmas advert

The Berenstain Bears' Christmas Tree
(1979, 25 mins)

Coming Home - Michael Morpurgo 

reciting his story with a mix of shots from the book and the author. Following, is Waitrose's interpretation of the tale as a short film.

Yet Another Partridge in a Pear Tree (Brian Muzik)

(a witty parody)

White Christmas by The Drifters 

(3D Animation 4K 1954)

From Snow Shovelling to Turkey Tech!

Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas

Singing Christmas Hedgehogs - Full Version (For the grown ups)

Wishing our members and followers all the best for Christmas and the holiday season.

Jennie Bales

Retired teacher librarian and CBCA Tasmania Social Media Coordinator

Young Readers Engaging with Books

As the school year draws to a close, this week’s post highlights some of the exciting programs that CBCA Tasmania has promoted and supported throughout 2025 that encourage students to connect and engage with reading through the exploration of great books. 

Young Tasmanian readers have had some amazing opportunities  in 2025 to engage with books in a shared environment. 

Leading up to Book Week in August, 10 groups of Tasmanian students were enrolled in the Book of the Year Shadow Judging program. This program see the students read, review and judge the books that have been shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards. This year Tasmania had groups judge Older Readers, Younger Readers, Early Childhood and Picture Book categories. Groups use the same criteria that the adult judges use to review the titles and then vote on which book they consider should be the winner in that year. This year the Shadow Judges (SJ) selected Birdy (Older Readers), Laughter is the Best Ending (Younger Readers), Spiro (Early Childhood) and The Truck Cat (Picture Book). Only Laughter is the Best Ending and The Truck Cat matched the Book of the Year Winners chosen by the Adult Judges. You can read some of reviews written by the Shadow Judges in the Term 4 CBCA Tasmania Newsletter, which will be available shortly on the CBCA Tas website. You can also see some of the creative responses these students posted to the Shadow Judging website (and specific Tasmanian SJ responses linked at the bottom of this blog.

Some examples of St Thomas More's responses
Published on CBCA website (see link at the end of post)

Young readers throughout Tasmania also had the opportunity to be involved in Readers’ Cup competitions throughout 2025. The Readers’ Cup competition is facilitated by different groups with support from CBCA Tasmania. Competitors read a selection of six titles, and then meet to answer quiz questions based on these titles and then perform a creative response to one or more of the titles.

In May, the Northern Primary Readers’ Cup had 17 schools meet and compete. Read all about it in a previous post! 

17 primary teams engage in the Northern Readers' Cup quiz.

In September two teams (another two had to withdraw) competed in the Northern Secondary Readers’ Cup. On December 10 there will be a planning meeting to plan for 2026 Northern Secondary Readers’ Cup. If you would like to attend this meeting, please email tas@cbca.org.au by COB on December 8 for information.

Dodges Ferry winning team

In October the Southern Primary Readers’ Cup returned after a few years recess. Only two schools competed but reportedly had a wonderful time and both have offered to host the 2026 competition. St Therese’s Catholic School hosted and won the creative challenge; Dodges Ferry Primary School won the Quiz and were overall winners.

In November Devonport Readers’ Cup had 10 teams compete at Latrobe. This cup is run by Toast For Kids Charity’s, Steve Martin, with the support of local councils, SEA FM and CBCA Tas. Teams of students from Devonport, Latrobe & Sheffield competed in what was considered to be the best competition in the nine year history of the Cup. SEA FM Radio Quiz Champions – Nixon Street Primary School won the Quiz component, Sheffield District High School the Creative Challenge and Hillcrest Primary School as the overall winners (highest score for quizzes and creative challenge).

Teams presenting their creative challenges

These two programs provide wonderful opportunities for young readers to engage deeply with texts and share a literary experience. They are enabled through the active involvement of teachers and teacher librarians.

Shadow Judging Creative Responses 2025

Hutchins School https://shadowjudging.cbca.org.au/creative-response/henry-w-hutchins-fluff-costume/

St Thomas More’s Catholic School https://shadowjudging.cbca.org.au/?s=St+Thomas+More

 

Felicity Sly 

Retired teacher-librarian and CBCA Tas 2025-2026 committee member

The Spark of a Story – A Year of Creative Writing with Students

As we move towards the end of the school year, Lyndon Riggall shares the wonderful writing talents of students at Cressy District High School who have engaged throughout the year with a literary program that has seen story writing skills and enthusiasm flourish. There are so many exciting ideas on show!

 

How do you make a story? That’s the first question that I have asked half a dozen rooms full of students this year. Typically, their answers have included everything from a title and an illustrator to paper, pens, and a really expensive laptop. Those things are helpful, of course, but luckily, they aren’t the most important. People have been telling stories for a very long time, and they haven’t always even had a title, let alone a MacBook Pro.

For me, there are three ingredients that form the basis of our recipe for story: a character, a setting, and a problem. I explain to the students that it doesn’t matter if your character is a person, a frog, or a piece of toast, as long as they have feelings, dreams, and a personality. Our setting can be anything: the house three doors down from yours, the bottom of the ocean, or even an imagined land where everything tastes like cake. Then, the problem of the story gives your character something to do: finding their missing shoe or building a tree house that reaches the moon. Whether the characters solve that problem or the problem solves them is the reason we keep reading.

At Cressy District High School, with the support of our principal Mark, our quality teaching coach Liz, and the team of wonderful teachers I have been working with this year, I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to implement a number of new programs with our students around the act of writing. The two that I have most enjoyed have been The Forge and Story Sparks. 

The Forge is a program for our senior cohort, with a number of students committing to spending a couple of lunchtimes each week taking on a creative writing challenge in their own time, such as describing a narrative backwards or writing about the world from the perspective of an object in their house. 

In Story Sparks, our primary school students work with me as a whole class to create a picture book from start to finish, developing and shaping shared ideas and then illustrating them to produce a complete book. Each story starts with those same three parts: a character, a setting, and a problem.

I adore the products of these collaborations with these students and their teachers, racing alongside them as each class pulls its own creation in an entirely different direction. Grade 1’s Simone Slipped! is about a girl who gets lost from her book and tries to find her way back again, while Wayward Sherrin, by one of our Grade 5/6 classes tells the story of a football that is sick of being kicked around and runs away to seek a new life. 

For a taste of exactly how these ideas come together, you can watch a video of Baarbara’s Bad Hair Day by Grade 3/4, which features them reading the story that they created alongside the amazing plasticine models that they made to help represent the different characters in our illustrations with the phenomenal support of their teacher Mrs Greig. 

I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to embed these programs as part of the work that I have been doing this year. I have often described my own personal philosophy around literacy as the lighting of a fire: if you create the conditions by which students can learn to love stories and storytelling in their own right, I wager, the rest simply follows, and this idea is reflected in the names of each program: The Forge is a place where students use that fire to build and shape something new, while Story Sparks are the first glowing beginnings of realising that anyone can make a story for themselves.

And so we create, following each time those same beginnings to new horizons. A character, a setting, and a problem: it’s true of everything from Where is the Green Sheep? to Hamlet. I try to encourage our young people to see, through these exercises, how simple the act of creating a story is, and how joyful it can be. I am so excited by what they have made. 

Now, here’s hoping that we can keep the fires burning.

Lyndon Riggall is a writer, teacher and co-president of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. You can find him at http://www.lyndonriggall.com or on social media @lyndonriggall.