The Hunger Games Companion and film

I've blogged before about Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, the first of which will be out on film soon. If you want to watch the trailer, there's a link here. I've also just added to stock The Hunger Games companion by Lois H Gresh, which I was lucky enough to win in a draw from the publishers, Macmillan Children's Books. Thanks very much to them. It contains an author profile and insights into the series' main themes, such as the nature of evil and the justification, or otherwise, of rebellion and war.

The novels are at J 808.3 COL and the Companion at J 808.309 GRE (although it'll be going out on the new books' display this weekend).

Guardian Children's Fiction Prize

Hot on the heels of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize comes the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, which yesterday went to Andy Mulligan for Return to Ribblestrop. According to this Guardian article, it's "a teacher's vision of life at the most inappropriate boarding school he could imagine – think tots of rum to keep the pupils warm, regular circus training and panthers giving birth." Another article explains why Mulligan thinks boarding schools are the perfect setting for a yarn.

We have all three of the Andy Mulligan books below in the library - they sound like rollicking reads.

Roald Dahl Funny Prize (and Catalyst and Galaxy awards!)

The winners of the Roald Dahl Funny Prizes are announced today. I don't know what they are yet, but while I'm waiting I can tell you about two more recent awards:

The Catalyst Award is chosen by teenagers in North Lanarkshire and this year's winner is Alex Scarrow for his book, TimeRiders:

"Liam O'Connor should have died at sea in 1912. Maddy Carter should have died on a plane in 2010. Sal Vikram should have died in a fire in 2029. Yet moments before death, someone mysteriously appeared and said, 'take my hand'. Liam, Maddy and Sal have been recruited by the TimeRiders, to stop time travel from destroying the world." 9+

The Galaxy National Book Awards were announced on November 4th and the Children's Book of the Year is A monster calls by Patrick Ness. It could also win the overall title of Book of the Year if you vote for it here. The book is a special one, because it was completed by Patrick from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself.

"The monster showed up just after midnight. But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild." 12+

And while I was writing this, the Roald Dahl announcement has been made:

"A rhyming picture book about pirate cats has seized the bounty for the funniest book for children aged six and under in this year’s Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Cats ahoy! is written by Peter Bently (who was also shortlisted in 2009 for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize), and illustrated by Jim Field. It is joined on the podium by The brilliant world of Tom Gates, the winner of the seven to fourteen category, and the first in a series of books about Tom, an expert doodler and master of excuses, written and illustrated by Liz Pichon."

All the books sound great - and on Thursday we have the Guardian prize to look forward to as well!

November is Picture Book Month

Celebrate picture books throughout November - check out the details on the Picture Book Month site. We have loads of good picture books upstairs in the children's section - shelved at J 808.33 - as well as giant picture books and a small selection of dual language picture books. To see the latest additons to stock use our LibraryThing page and look for those titles tagged Picture Book. Finally, did you know you could search SUPrimo, the library catalogue, for picture books by theme? We add a subject tag to all children's fiction so that you can use it to support projects in school. For example, here's a list of picture books on Christmas. If you aren't sure how to do this for other subjects, come and ask in the library - I'll be glad to help.

Happy Halloween!

It's probably a bit late if you haven't got your resources yet, but here's a list of some of the Halloween items in our catalogue and our display is still upstairs with some nice witchy badges to take away. Here's also a roundup of other recommendations that I've noticed on various blogs over the last few days:

Nosy Crow

Reading Groups for Everyone

Lynne Rickards (fabulous pictures of spooky food on this one!)

Library Mice

Fantastic Reads

Scholastic

TES

Teachmeet Strathclyde

Jordanhill Library Stand

I was really pleased to be asked to have a Library stand at the recent Strathclyde Teachmeet, and what a great night it was, brilliantly organised by the officers of CPD Strathclyde, all B.Ed students. The thing that garnered most interest on the stand was Children's Literature Update (the orange A4 booklet you can see on the right hand table above.) This is an index to articles and web links about books and authors for children and teenagers which I produce four times a year. You can pick up a copy on the display table upstairs by the children's books, or give me your email address to receive it electronically. I also tweet it, which means you can access it via Hootsuite.

As well as staffing the stand, I attended the talks - a mixture of 2 minute and 7 minute presentations. I thoroughly enjoyed them all. It was great to see the sorts of activities that go on when students are on placement - Rea Chisholm's collaborative group work on environments was a highlight, especially the pictures of the giant model of a shark. A couple of talks were based around digital literacy - Ollie Bray on Wikipedia and Andrew James on rights-cleared resources on the web. This is obviously a topic that teachers and librarians have in common, and I felt I learnt something from each of them. There's also a thriving group of librarians on Twitter and we use it in much the same way as Morven Skinnider described for "tweachers", to communicate and share information. I think a lot of students signed up to Twitter after her talk and I'd be pleased to welcome any of them as followers of @JordanhillLib (you can see our Twitter feed down the right hand side of the blog to get an idea of what we tweet about). Those were just a few of the talks - I enjoyed all the rest too, but just wanted to give a brief flavour.

Of course, I can't finish without mentioning the awesome cup cake display. I didn't get to try one because I left before the question and answer session at the end, and we were strongly discouraged from spoiling the pattern before that! And guess what? Libraians like cake too, another thing we have in common.

Teachmeet cupcakes

Reading with kids - the verdict

The supplements promised below by the Guardian and Observer have now been perused on your behalf. Although probably written more with parents in mind, there is still some good stuff in them for the classroom.

"Kindling a lifelong love of books" is the aim. Part 1 covers ages 0-7. None of it should be surprising to any self-respecting education student, but there are, amongst other things, useful book recommendations (most of which we have I'm pleased to say), an article by Julia Donaldson on how picture books can teach youngsters to understand themselves and a section on book games, including making your own wordsearches.

Part 2 covers children's books for 8+. The format is similar with brief book reviews (again, no surprises, I knew most of them) and articles - the most interesting consider books making the leap to films, apps, websites and electronic devices, all of which could play a role in encouraging reluctant readers.

In conclusion then, if you know a lot about children's books already you aren't going to learn much here, but if you want a good, basic introduction these supplements are worth a look. You can read the content online by following the link above, or if you prefer to look at the paper copies I have put them in our Cuttings File - ask at the Lending Services Desk for numbers 1227 for ages 0-7 and 1228 for 8+.