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!

Support Seven Stories

Seven Stories is an amazing place for anyone interested in children's books and I've written about it several times before, most recently a couple of months ago when it was awarded the right to call itself "National". It's based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city which has become notorious for its proposals to withdraw all the funding it gives to cultural organisations. You can find details on the Seven Stories site about how this will affect the Centre along with an email address and a suggested text for responding to the Council's consultation exercise - this ends on 1st February, so there's not much time left. Newcastle is also proposing to close several of its branch libraries, including the one I used when I was growing up, so I've written today about both things. If you are interested, you can read my letter with my reasons for protesting over on my library blog.

Anne Shirley: my continuing obsession

Since I first read Anne of Green Gables I have wanted to visit Prince Edward Island, home of both L M Montgomery and her much-loved characters. Last summer, I wrote here about achieving that ambition. I said then that I wanted to re-read all the books in the series - and now I have! There are 8 books directly about Anne and her family, plus two Chronicles which are essentially short stories about other people in which Anne occasionally appears. In order, they are:

Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of Windy Willows (sometimes called Windy Poplars)
Anne's House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside 

Some I borrowed from the library, most were available as free ebooks and a few I had to pay a small amount to download. So what did I think? I was a little disappointed. I love Anne of Green Gables. It's a strong story, the three main characters are believable and lovable and the relationships between them beautifully drawn. If you're reading this, you probably know the story already, so I won't go over it here, but I will say the other books can't match it. Anne grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe, her sort-of-childhood-sweetheart, and has a large family. It's all a bit ordinary. After Anne's House of Dreams, the books are really about her children anyway, and Anne retreats into the background as an idealised mother figure.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy the books - I did, but there was an element of perseverance to reading them, each one striking me as dull to start with so that I had to struggle to get into them. I could always have told you the plot of Green Gables, but the sequels had left very little impression. Some examples: I had totally forgotten how pious the language was - perhaps, as a daughter of the manse myself, this hadn't struck me quite so forcibly as a child as it does now. However, as the manse I grew up in was Methodist, I'm amazed I didn't remember the strong anti-Methodist prejudice of Miss Cornelia who appears in the later books. I was fairly sure during Anne's first pregnancy that it ended badly, and the sadness of little Joyce's death confirmed this. In the same book, House of Dreams, there was a sub-plot which I vaguely remembered about a young woman whose husband had come home from sea brain-damaged, but I wasn't at all prepared for the dramatic denouement. The things I did remember vividly were often small ones such as the phrase "crossing the bar" for the death of an old sea-captain and Anne's preference for the word "dusk" rather than "twilight"', which I didn't agree with at the time but do now.

I though the best sequel was the last one. In Rilla of Ingleside, which concentrates on Anne's youngest daughter, we again have a single protagonist with real personality. Rilla is also more dramatic because it's set against the background of World War 1 with unbearable tension as all the young men volunteer to fight for the mother-country. I just knew they couldn't all come back, but didn't know which one/s would be lost. Another strong point of the book is that Susan - housekeeper for most of Anne's marriage - comes into her own. Always a faintly comic figure, she adds to this both fierce patriotism and an unsuspected talent as a military tactician. If only the generals could have listened to her!

I'm glad I undertook this project, but feel I've exhausted the obsession for the meantime and Anne can go back on her shelf until I need her again. However, it has started me thinking about other places I have visited because of a character in a book. My first trip to the US included a visit to Provincetown, original home of Dicey Tillerman, another spirited heroine from a series by Cynthia Voigt. I have the first book (Homecoming) on my shelves and might just start there!

Patrons of Reading

If you are a School Librarian or teacher, you might be interested in the Patrons of Reading scheme which aims to match up authors and schools to work with each other and promote reading for pleasure. The first partnership started in Wales between Helen Pielichaty and Ysgol Esgob Morgan and the first Scottish Patron was Nicola Morgan who is now working with Larbert High School. There's a list of authors still available, including two in Scotland: Joan Lennon, based in Fife, and Lynne Rickards of Glasgow.

While we're on the subject of promoting reading, there are more ideas from the winners of the Siobhan O'Dowd Trust's competition last year to promote the joy of reading. As with the Patrons of Reading scheme, both primary and secondary age-groups are covered.

So, short and to the point - this is the first post of 2013. I'll try to write more next time and in the meantime, as the graphic says, Happy New Year!

Merry Quizmas? Book related activities for kids

Merry Christmas one and all! If you have children to entertain, here are a few book-related activities which might occupy them for, ooh, two minutes at least!

So this is Quizmas comes from Book Trust and is described as "fiendishly difficult". I wouldn't say that exactly, but I only scored 14/20 so must try harder! There are loads of other quizzes onsite too.

The Guardian children's book pages are also good for activities, including Christmassy ones. They have a quiz too, Christmas presents in children's fiction. I did even worse here, 4/10, which brought the message "Ho Ho Ho, oh no! You need to start reading more Christmas books!" You can also find a lesson in how to draw Father Christmas from Jessica Ahlberg on the same site. 

National Literacy Trust has a whole page of  Christmas activities, some with prizes.

Finally, Scottish Book Trust, the Herald and Turnberry Resort have teamed up to launch a story writing competition for children in three age groups, 5-8, 9-12 and 13-17. The themes are "The Holiday Secret", "Strangers in Town" or "New Beginnings" and the closing date is 14th January, so the Christmas holiday is the perfect time to enter.

I think this will be the last post for 2012 so Merry Christmas once again, Happy New Year and see you in 2013.

Engaging teenagers with book trailers: course report

Book trailers are an excellent means of engaging teenagers in reading and writing. Gordana Nesterovic recently attended a course about them and has shared her report:

I recently attended this CPD session which was organized by Scottish Book Trust as a follow up to the ReadIT course on digital storytelling. ReadIT was a pilot scheme aimed at developing teachers’ skills through the inclusion of ICT tools and digital storytelling techniques in classroom practice. Students and teachers from Denmark, Italy, Romania, Turkey and Scotland took part.

The first part of the CPD session was a video-link presentation by Shirley Brice Heath (linguistic anthropologist and Professor of both English and Dramatic Literature) who talked about young people’s reading habits, preferences and how they choose to interact with texts. I thought it exemplified an interesting approach in trying to encourage teenagers to read and write by "finding them where they are most comfortable" – in social media websites. In creating book trailers, students are applying knowledge gained outside the school back into academic achievement. Creating a book trailer is a form of translation, shifting something from a page in the book into a different medium and timescale. It shows multi-literacies at work: music, visual effects, movement, animation and character portrayal. This method makes the students think of what the book is about, rather than what the book says. Shirley Brice Heath also mentioned ideal outcomes of trailer production: pupils identify with the "good company" of other authors and artists, and take on roles other than that of “pupil” by becoming imaginative, creative and artistic, and by acting as critics and definers of their own work.

The second part of the session was a presentation by two Scottish teachers who took part in this course. They talked about their experiences in implementing these ideas and their feedback was very positive. The children enjoyed the project and the project brought out the best in them. It worked really well with reluctant readers and children who generally came across as being very shy. It developed their analytical, artistic and technical skills. I thought the example of a school that did it as cross-curricular project was very good, it got the Art, Computing and English departments working together which showed the possibility of using this tool in teaching other subjects, not just English. I do not work as a teacher or in a school library, but I can see how this example would be interesting for student teachers and would shed an inspirational light on teaching practices.

Here is an excellent example of a book trailer, as mentioned at the IBBY UK/NCRCL MA Conference Beyond the Book a few weeks ago. It's for A monster calls by Patrick Ness:

Getting books to kids at Christmas

Any books in these parcels?

I don't need to tell readers of this blog about the joy of books and the importance of getting children reading, nor that many children do not have the advantages of growing up in a house full of books or with parents that take them to libraries. Libraries, are of course, very important - for one of the best, recent arguments of this, read Jeanette Winterson's impassioned piece in the Guardian - but there's something wonderful about holding a book that you actually own, especially if it's your first. I've come across a couple of initiatives that aim to put books in the hands of children who otherwise wouldn't have any this Christmas.

Books for Kids for Christmas is linked to the charity Children First.
Last year they raised over £3300 to buy books for vulnerable Scottish children at Christmas, as a result of which 380 children and young people received a book of their very own from Santa. The appeal runs until Sunday 2nd December. Nicola Morgan writes about Blackwell's Children's Book Tree - you can join in by phone if you don't live in Edinburgh, Oxford or Cambridge where they have branches - from which you choose a request from a child in difficult circumstances, and that child receives the book for Christmas. These are just two ideas - Zoe at Playing by the Book lists 125 book and literacy charities and, going off the book topic altogether, did you know that John Lewis has a gift list so that children in refuges get Christmas presents? List no 522953.

Happy giving!