Richard and Judy's Children's Bookclub

Richard and Judy have launched their children's book club. The club is made up of three categories - Reading together, Reading by yourself and Fluent reader - with six book titles in each.


Choices include Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder by Jo Nesbo, Horrid Henry and the Football Fiend by Francesca Simon and The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford.

Read more via the BBC or the Booktrust - the latter link contains a full list of featured titles. Many of the titles are in stock here.

Appy Talk

I've been contemplating a post about children's book apps for a while, and then up popped Kate Wilson's article in the latest Books for Keeps. Kate is Managing Director of Nosy Crow, a new children's publishing company which will include apps for children aged 2 to 7 in its output, as well as books for ages 0 to 14. Her article explains why they have decided to do this and the approach they are taking to apps - Kate doesn't believe they should be squashing existing books into a new format but creating original reading experiences for touch screen devices using their capacity for sound, animation and interactivity to tell stories in a new and engaging way. Kate makes the case much better than I can, so please read the article.

Someone else who has written about apps recently is Trevor Cairney in his blog Literacy, families and learning. He's covered them in three recent posts:
"Alice", the iPad and new ways to read picture books
Literacy and the iPad: a review of some popular apps
Literacy and the iPad: a second review of children's literature apps

Finally, apps are not just for fiction - they can help with all areas of the curriculum. Even the Scottish Government has noticed - see Help with school: there's an app for that from the Engage for Education site.

What's new? Crime blog for teens, Richard & Judy and other delights

Here's a round up of items that have caught my eye in the last few days:

Crime Central is a new blog for teens, set up by authors Keren David, Anne Cassidy, Gillian Philip and Linda Strachan. It's stated aims are "to celebrate crime fiction for teen readers. Find out about new books, leave your comments and reviews, read interviews with authors." There's not much there at the moment, it's one to watch, but there is a competition to win a signed copy of one of Anne Cassidy's books.

The Bookseller tells us that Richard and Judy will launch a new children's book club with W H Smith on the 27th January. The Children's Book Club will involve real families, with the books selected by a ­variety of children, and will have three categories: Reading Together (from pre-school to year 1), Developing Reader (7–9 years) and Fluent (any age from 8 years on).

Jill R Bennett has started a new review site, Red Reading Hub. Jill is an Early Years specialist and says "In these pages, I hope to be able to highlight books, both those recently published as well as ones that have been well and truly tried and tested, that ‘work’ with children either at home, playgroups, nurseries or schools. In some instances, there will be ideas for working with the books."

The latest winner of the Costa Children's Book prize is Jason Wallace for Out of the Shadows, a story set in Zimbabwe just after independence. Oops, I seem to have missed that one so I've ordered it for the Library now. You can read an interview with Jason Wallace on the Books for Keeps site and Booktrust has a reading guide to download.

Finally, it's time to elect a new Children's Laureate. Anthony Browne's tenure is coming to an end and suggestions for the next one are invited - previous Laureates have been Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen so there are some hard acts to follow. There's also a competition for children to win tickets to the award ceremony in June. The closing date is 28th February.

Death of Dick King-Smith

Sad news for the beginning of the year - Dick King-Smith, author of The Sheep-Pig on which the film Babe was based, has died. This was just one of many titles he wrote - check our library collection for more. Just a few are illustrated below. There is already an obituary in the Guardian and I will add more as they come in. See also the Books for Keeps Authorgraph from a while back.



More obituaries:
BBC
Books for Keeps
Herald
Scribble City Central
Independent
Telegraph

Why Patrick Ness is better than Tom Cruise and other miscellany

Well, the snow and the end of term have got in the way of blogging for quite some time, so here are some of the items I'd been meaning to write about all thrown together in an end of year pot pourri. No particular order, but I've put Patrick Ness first because I liked the headline!

Why Patrick Ness is better than Tom Cruise comes from those nice people at Scottish Book Trust who recently took Ness on tour around Renfrewshire and West Dunbartonshire. Alison, the librarian from Clydebank High School, posted on their blog to talk about the effect of Patrick Ness on her pupils. There's also a video from the tour.

Still with Scottish Book Trust, did you know about their Teachers' Online Bookgroups? There's one each for books for primary and secondary age children, and one for professional development. Each has downloadable material to go with the texts, e.g. for Choke Chain by Jason Donald (a book for secondary children) there are teachers' notes, an interview with the author and a podcast of him reading an extract from the book.

Picture books do still work for kids - an article in October in the New York Times suggested that picture books were no longer a staple as parents tried to push their children towards "chapter books". This has promted responses from both CBS News and Publisher's Weekly - don't write the obit for picture books yet, they say. Certainly not in this Library, where they remain very popular.

Enid Blyton falls out of children's favour is an article in the Telegraph which relates that Blyton has fallen out of the top ten list of children's authors for the first time in decades because youngsters cannot relate to her language. Hmm, we don't stock her anyway because we don't consider her good enough quality (though I read them all when I was growing up and I turned into a librarian, so they can't be that bad!)

If you want quality, Julia Donaldson is a safe bet. An article in the Guardian's Books Blog praises Stick Man as a potential Christmas classic.

Looking for fiction for 10-14s? Look no further than the Literacy Adviser (Bill Boyd, latterly of Learning and Teaching Scotland) - and happily, most of the recommended titles on his long list are in stock here. The rest of the site is worth a look too. I now subscribe to his blog, and after the New Year I hope to create a Blogroll of this and others that I consult regularly.

Another good blog to follow for children's and teenage fiction is Tall Tales & Short Stories. For example, here's an interview with Keith Charters and Graham Watson of Strident Publishing - a Scottish publisher based in East Kilbride, many of whose books we have in our catalogue.

David Almond is a popular, and award-winning, author whose My Dad's a Birdman is now a play - Observer review here. Skellig, of course, was made into a film and we have both book and DVD in stock.

If you like Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Darkness series you might want to listen to her reading from the 6th and final title, Ghost hunter, in a Guardian podcast.

Books for Keeps has started a film-review section. Guess what the first review is? Harry Potter of course!

And finally - the "Books of the year" lists have started coming out. Here are 32 gathered together (not all children's) by SCC English blog and an international collection (all children's) from Chicken Spaghetti.

Season's greetings to everyone. See you in 2011!

Scotland's Stories and Scotland's Songs

Have a look at these great new sites from Learning and Teaching Scotland.

Scotland's Stories:

"Scotland is a treasure house of stories, from myths and legends to wee tales told in the playground.
The strange and fantastical stories of Scotland have inspired writers, artists and poets for centuries. Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson both recalled as adults the tales of ghosts, magic and witches they had heard as children.
Stories, storytelling and storymaking can have an incredible impact on a child’s growing imagination. Scotland’s storytellers and the Scottish Storytelling Centre provide opportunities for everyone to celebrate and share in Scotland’s rich storytelling heritage, promoting storytelling as a vibrant contemporary art form."

Scotland's songs:

"Families and friends, heroes and villains, games and laughter, school and work, love and freedom – it’s all here in Scotland’s Songs. Listen to more than 130 songs and tunes, in Scots and Gaelic, and learn about the long and rich tradition of Scottish music, still very much alive across the nation and known and loved across the world.
You can learn about traditional songs and music, understand themes in Scottish music and find out more about Scotland's instruments, like the bagpipes and the clarsach.
There’s a short introduction to each song or tune, along with song lyrics and the musical notation for almost every tune.
Why not start by finding your favourite Scottish song?"

The 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books?

Last week, we had the 25 Best Children's Books from the Telegraph. This weekend, The Observer got in on the act with it's 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books, as chosen by Kate Kellaway. Again, I think it's a bit of an eccentric selection. I've never heard of The lonely doll by Dare Wright (1957) for example. I cetainly agree with Shirley Hughes' Dogger and Quentin Blake's All join in, but not with Babar. The newest title is a Lauren Child but, as one commenter says, where is Emily Gravett? A bright, new Greenaway award-winning illustrator who should be on the list. Again, see what you think.