Sunday, August 30, 2009

CBC Book Week winners, short list and slogan







Now that the dust has settled on another exciting book week at my school I thought I would pen a few thoughts about the books from 2009 and our library happening over the last week.

Firstly the slogan – wow what a great one! I did struggle with Reading Rocks, Readiscover and Book Now! but not with Book Safari. We certainly had great fun with this slogan. The children made maps, binoculars, postcards, jungle animals and vines. In fact every day last week was just filled with fun. My library is overflowing with amazing creations.

On the short list front I just loved Puffling by Margaret Wild and so did all my youngest children. We were of course sad when it received no prize this year. Leaf by Stephen Michael King (Honour Book award) is a very special book and we were able to display the pages on our Interactive Whiteboard which really allowed whole classes to see all the little details. Even though Leaf is quite long I found even the youngest children became really involved. How to Heal a Broken wing (Early Childhood Picture book of the Year) worked well with slightly older students. As I have said in a previous blog, Bob Graham is one of my all time favourite picture book people. We prepared for How to Heal a Broken wing by reading Pete and Roland which is where Bob Graham began. I think talking about care and compassion, the really special family that Will belongs to and those key words of love, time and hope really helped the children to relate to this very special book.

I am not a huge fan of Colin Thompson, although I do appreciate the amazing hard work and detail in the illustrations of his earlier books like How to Live forever and Tower to the Sun. The Big little book of Happy Sadness (Honour Book) has a lovely story with all the right ingredients for me – an emotional story, an intelligent story that allows the reader to ‘fill the gaps’ and just the right amount of humour. I just love the slipper foot George and his grandma make for their three legged dog. I am not a fan of the illustrations but the children in my school did enjoy this book. From the short list we were hoping Nobody owns the Moon by Tohby Riddle would be awarded a prize. This book has a lovely message and such interesting illustrations.

Now we can start thinking about the 2010 slogan – Across the Story Bridge!

1 comment:

jennyhogan said...

I absolutely loved the Shaun Tan book "Tales from outer suburbia"that won the award for older readers. I will defintely have to get hold of some of the picture book for younger readers now also" can't wait to check them out