Julia Donaldson stirs things up

From yesterday's Herald: Children's author Julia Donaldson has blamed bureaucratic jargon in Scotland's new school curriculum for making teaching difficult.

What Julia is complaining about is an aspect of Curriculum for Excellence whereby teachers allegedly can't state what a child has achieved, but are expected to link it to the four underlying principles: that pupils be successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. She also goes on to criticise the pendulum in methods for teaching reading which swings to and from phonics, whereas she is more in favour of blended techniques and, in this context, mentions a new series of plays she has launched to encourage group reading. As a non-teacher, I wouldn't dream of entering either of these arguments, but it reminded me of an article that I read before Christmas and had forgotten to write about.

Glasgow's Westender Magazine (scroll to the December / January edition) also interviewed Julia and she spoke to them about her plays too (Bug Club Plays To Read, a series of 36 published by Pearson - a few are shown below). As she said to the Herald "Reading a play is a way of involving everyone and it is brilliant because it means the children can all take part and can have roles which reflect their reading abilities." It can also help reluctant readers by making reading more fun and improve shyer children's self-confidence. Her new website, Picture Book Plays, has been set up to help teachers dramatise stories themselves. So Julia might be stirring things up, but it sounds as though it could be to good effect!

Children's Laureate Library Tour

This is another guest post by my friend and former colleague, Gordana Nesterovic:

Children's Laureate Julia Donaldson will be embarking on a national tour of 35 libraries in England, Wales and Scotland, from the Highlands to Penzance, over six weeks. The tour begins today with an event at Thurso Library in the Northern Highlands and will celebrate libraries as a precious community resource at a time when a great many are threatened with closure. The full list of the libraries that Julia Donaldson will be visiting in this autumn's Children's Laureate Library Tour can be found here (events are aimed at groups of school children who will be able see Julia bringing her characters to life, but who will also have a chance to perform to Julia - so not all events will be open to public.)

Julia will also be visiting local independent bookshops, celebrating community relations between libraries, bookshops and schools. To coincide with the launch of her libraries tour, Julia will also be launching a new website for teachers (details yet to be announced) to help them to use drama and performance to bring picture books to life in the classroom. I feel this will be of particular importance as teachers, as well as librarians, are in position to help each child find the right book for them and ignite the spark of enjoying reading that will last a lifetime. The author of Gruffalo, amongst 75 other books, has always been very passionate about libraries and has worked very hard campaigning against library closures, including sending an open letter to the newly appointed Culture Secretary.

Yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph published the list of five of the best children's books about libraries, chosen by Julia Donaldson : Otto the book bear (2011) by Katie Cleminson, Delilah Darling is in the library (2007) by Jeanne Willis, Library lion (2008) by Michelle Knudsen, Wolves (2006) by Emily Gravett and Little Bo Peep's library book (1999) by Cressida Cowell.

If you are a Strathclyde University Library member, you will find the first four book in stock in the Children's Literature Collection. The last one is out of print at the moment, but might be found in your local library.

Julia Donaldson to visit Jordanhill

First of all, a Happy New Year and an apology for the lack of posts in 2012 so far. Those of you who have seen the state of the Library after the storms will understand the amount of time that has been spent running around with buckets chasing leaks!

I see from Twitter that Julia Donaldson is visiting the campus to talk to students next Wednesday.  That's really exciting news, so I thought I'd put together a few links in advance. First of all, I have written about her several times before in these blogposts and, as you might expect, the Library has a large selection of her books, listed here. Julia has her own website, as does her most famous character, the Gruffalo. She's also the Children's Laureate for 2011-13 and is a keen supporter of libraries, having spoken out against the type of cuts which are happening in many (mostly English) local authorities. (Read her views on her Children's Laureate blog).

When Julia became Laureate, a vote was taken to see which of her books were readers' favourites, and the results were 1. The Gruffalo. 2. Room on the Broom and 3. Stick Man, shown below.



I'm sure the visit will be really successful.

Bookbug - a Julia Donaldson book for every P1 child

Julia Donaldson and Dillon Ryan (5) from Lochside primary School in Angus, celebrate the gifting of Julia’s award-winning book, What the Ladybird Heard, to every P1 child in Scotland, through Scottish Book Trust’s Bookbug programme. It was also announced at the event that Julia has agreed to become patron of the Bookbug book gifting programme. 

Scottish Book Trust has announced that it will gift a free book to every P1 child in Scotland this November as part of its Bookbug programme, an early year’s initiative that aims to give every child in Scotland a lifelong love of books. 60,000 copies of What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson, winner of the 2010 Scottish Children's Book Awards, have been distributed to classrooms around the country.

Children entering P1 should already have received three free packs of books from Bookbug at 6 weeks, 18 months, and three years, and so should be familiar with the programme, formerly known as Bookstart. Primary One is the final intervention point.

Scottish Book Trust has also announced that multi-award winning author and Children’s Laureate, Julia Donaldson, has agreed to be patron of the Bookbug programme. Donaldson, who was born in London but now lives in Glasgow, is most famous for her best-selling picture book, The Gruffalo, which was made into an Oscar-nominated animated film last year. To date she has written 160 books.

More information: 

BookbugSessions take place at local libraries or community groups. These are free, fun-filled story and rhyme sessions for 0-4-year-olds.

Teacher resources to support the gifting of What the Ladybird Heard, including posters, games and fun ideas based on themes in the book, are available to download from Scottish Book Trust’s website.

A video of Julia reading What the Ladybird Heard is also available.

New Children's Laureate announced

The new Children's Laureate for 2011-13 was announced today at noon - it's Julia Donaldson! She is the 7th to take the title and is the author of over 120 books and plays for children and teenagers, including some of the UK’s best-selling picture books, most famously The Gruffalo. I think Julia is a great choice, though I'm slightly surprised they went for two picture book authors in a row - my guess was Philip Pullman, so what do I know?

Julia succeeds Anthony Browne, author of Gorilla, Willy the Wimp and many other popular titles. In one of his final acts as Laureate, Anthony wrote an open letter to his (then unknown) successor which was published in the Independent on Sunday with the sub-heading "Cuts are outrageous". In it, he warns that we will "pay the price in the long term" for closing public and school libraries and urges his successor to do everything to support them. The Guardian  also has advice for the new Laureate with a page headed "What should the new Children's Laureate do?" and invites you to contribute:

"We want to create a "To Do list" for the new laureate, telling him or her what children want their Laureate to do. It might be as big as "save our libraries" or as small as "visit our school because we never have authors come to see us". It might be something to do with writing rather than reading, or making sure kids' voices are heard in the books world. Whatever your idea, email it to childrens.books@guardian.co.uk and we'll create a big list to present to the new Laureate. We'll also be checking up on him or her during their two year term to see how they are getting on."

Some ideas are already coming through via Twitter, e.g. @dewey027 says "New children's laureate should campaign for statutory school libraries and librarians and getting books to children." Julia is likely to warm to this theme too - she took part in the lobbying of the Scottish parliament on Save our Libraries day in February. That's good news for all library-lovers, and even better news for us as she's Scottish based.

Click on the links for the books we hold by Anthony Browne and Julia Donaldson.

Julia Donaldson exhibition

An exhibition of contemporary children's book illustration curated by Julia Donaldson opens at the Park Gallery in Falkirk on 12th March. The Illustrators is an exhibition of work by artists who have illustrated Julia's books, such as Axel Scheffler. There is also a programme of events. Get ready for a visit by borrowing some of Julia's books from us.

Royal Mail Awards for Scottish Children's Books

The award ceremony was yesterday and the winners were:


Bookbug Readers 0-7 Category
What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Lydia Monks


Younger Readers 8-11 Category
Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles by Barry Hutchison


Older Readers 12-16 Category
Grass by Cathy MacPhail


I'm delighted to say we have all the titles in the Library (check SUPrimo for details.) For more information, including photos of the award ceremony hosted by Janice Forsyth, see the Scottish Book Trust site. There are also write-ups in the Edinburgh Reporter, the Bookseller and Booktrade.info and you can read illustrator Lydia Monks' blog about her day at the awards here.

PS Coverage also in the Glaswegian 3/3/11

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!

Gruffalo tops list of children's favourite books

The Gruffalo has come out top in a Booktrust survey of children's favourite books. Almost one in five children (18%) picked the Julia Donaldson tale, while Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Peppa Pig, by Ladybird books, came joint second with 11%. See the BBC's story for more details - and, of course, we have the Gruffalo and many other Julia Donaldson titles in our catalogue.

Gruffalo

"He's got a black tongue, orange eyes and a poisonous wart on the end of his nose, not to mention those purple nightmare-inducing prickles on his back. And this Christmas Day he's going to be on the telly."

Read more in Ailin Quinlan's article in the Irish Independent.

See also Julia Donaldson books in Jordanhill Library.

And PS - interview from Guardian 19/12/09

Gruffalo nation's favourite bedtime story

The Gruffalo, written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, has been voted the nation's favourite bedtime story by Radio 2 listeners. Others on the shortlist included Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and Where The Wild Things Are. The Gruffalo has also been adapted by BBC1 - with Robbie Coltrane in the title role - and will be screened at Christmas. Read a fuller report in yesterday's Herald.

The Gruffalo ten years on.

The Gruffalo, written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, has become a modern classic since it was first published in 1999, and it's also soon to be a film. In yesterday's Observer, Robert McCrum puts it in its place in the great tradition of British storytelling for children.

Julia Donaldson

There's an article in today's Guardian about Julia Donaldson. Best known for her Gruffalo picture books, she has now written her first book for older children. Running on the Cracks, for age 11+, is published on Monday by Egmont at £6.99. It's also on order for the Library. In it, the protagonist, a runaway, stumbles into the world of the mentally ill. It is a world Julia knows intimately. She navigated through it with increasing desperation for more than a decade with her husband, Malcolm, as they tried to help Hamish, their eldest son. This book is dedicated to his memory, and the article describes how the family has tried to cope with his eventual suicide.