Momo celebrating time to read: Night of the Notables 2021 Guest Speaker (me)

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Night of the Notables 2021 Guest Speaker (me)

Tonight I had the wonderful opportunity to share books I read in 2020 - books I have talked about here on Momotimetoread - as guest speaker at the Night of the Notables. This is an event hosted by the Children's Book Council of Australia (NSW Branch) where we celebrate the books selected for the Notable list in each of the five competition categories - Early Childhood Picture Book; Younger Readers; Older Readers; Picture Book of the Year and the Eve Pownall Award for Non Fiction.

I decided to talk about my 2020 reading journey and this blog - momotimetoread. My blog began in 2008 and when I was thinking of a name I had two thoughts. Firstly I had held dear one novel I read before I became a Teacher-Librarian - Momo by Michael Ende. A young reader, the child of a friend, shared this book with me in about 1980. Momo is an allegory about time and the way, when adults give away their time (in this case to the evil time thieves), it means there is little or no time left for their children. Momo herself is the hero of the story. She witnesses the neglect of the children and sets about trying to thwart the dreadful time thieves.

Ende, Michael. Momo. Puffin (Penguin Random House)

So I had the word Momo. The next ingredient I thought of all the children who visited my school library. Over 32 years I worked in five school libraries. While this didn't happen every week, way too often a little child would return a library book, I would exclaim "wow wasn't that a great book" and the child would say "Mummy or Daddy or whoever the adult in their house - didn't have time to read it."

In 2008 mobile phones were not quite as ubiquitous as they are now but let's put these ideas together. Children need your time. They need to to hear you read books. They need time for reading themselves. There should be time in a family when children see adults reading. Looking at screens and not talking with a child makes me despair. The children in my former school were from affluent families and yet often no one could be bothered to take a little time to read a picture book (borrowed from the library) with their child. A picture book - that is ten minutes of your life! Hence we come to the name Momotimetoread. My hope is that adults will give time to their children - reading to them, reading with them, giving their children time to read, reading themselves, talking about books and more.

You can buy thyme at the supermarket but you cannot buy or make time it is something we have already. We all need to think about how we use the time we have.

Your children will become readers if you give them the precious gift of time.

When I write my blog I have several audiences in my mind. I am thinking of parents who might like to discover new books. I am thinking of a senior primary child who might use my suggestions next time they visit their school library. And I am thinking, and this is the main one, of my Teacher-Librarian colleagues who may not have time to read every book. For the teachers and Teacher-Librarians who read my posts I like to include extras - teachers notes, author and illustrator web site links, ideas for further reading, and occasional discussion ideas or thematic links. Lately I have been giving books a star rating. I only give two levels - five stars (I loved it) and four stars (I loved it but with minor reservations). I completed post number 2000 earlier this year. Here is a Pinterest listing nearly every book I blogged in 2020.

Two of my topics for this talk link to IBBY Australia. We have held several events recently which focus on books translated into English. You can find many titles in this Pinterest collection. IBBY also have a wonderful program where they collect wordless books. IBBY call these Silent Books. I have a Pinterest of these too but I called them "Textless Books".

Here are the books I talked about at CBCA the Night of the Notables 2021. I could have easily talked about many more books but my time was limited to twenty minutes so I needed to be selective. Titles in colour link to the post about each book. I divided my talk into sections: