NCACL Picture Books for Older Readers part 2

 

I talked about this splendid new database - YES it is FREE - a couple of days ago. Thinking about the wonderful books - 240+ of them - I thought I might explore some of the subjects. Happily they are not restricted to "English Syllabus concepts". 

Here are some examples - one for each letter of the alphabet. There are of course lots more subjects to explore.  I have put one book as an example of each but when you explore the database you will find so many more titles to share with your students or to simply recommend to a reader. 

I hope my examples will show you the depth and range of books and subjects in the database. On my side bar I have the heading Senior Picture Book - click this to discover even more titles (Australian and International). 

Asylum Seekers

Anisa's Alphabet

Betrayal

Dumazi and the big Yellow Lion

Compassion

Finding You (note comment by the author on my post)

Dystopian Fiction

The Duck and the Darklings

Emotions

Fox

Friendship

Heart and Soul

Generosity

Ling Li's Lantern

Humour

Identity

Read this essay by Shaun Tan where he talks about Picture Books

Joy

Kindness

If you come to Earth

Libraries

Music

Sonam and the Silence

Natural disasters

Orphans

A soldier, a dog and a boy

Perspective

Refugees

Teacup

Sharing

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge

Travel

Wordless Picture Books

The Boy and the Elephant

I am giving the picture book master Shaun Tan the last word:

This is perhaps what reading and visual literacy are all about - and what picture books are good for - continuing that playful inquiry we began in childhood, of using imagination to find significance and meaning in those ordinary, day-to-day experiences that might otherwise remain unnoticed. The lessons we learn from studying pictures and stories are best applied to a similar study of life in general - people, places, objects, emotions, ideas and the relationships between them all. At it’s most successful, fiction offers us devices for interpreting reality, and imagining how many such interpretations might be possible. Shaun Tan

The Forgotten Song: Saving the Regent Honeyeater by Coral Vass illustrated by Jess Racklyeft

"Regent's father had learnt the song from his father, who learnt it from his father too. But with Regent's species now facing extinction, there is no one around to teach him. Regent tries to mimic the sounds of different birds but without success. Will Regent learn his mating call before it is too late? Or will his ancient song be forgotten forever?"

This is a sad book. This is an uplifting book. The ending is hopeful but also open-ended.  The pages are filled with rich and highly appealing illustrations. The plot is simple - you have read it before - but using our Australian birds to tell the story provides the perfect balance of science, Australian fauna and flora and animal conservation all told in a form that is reassuringly familiar to younger readers.

Looking at the story form - a young Regent Honeyeater is old enough to find a mate. To do this he needs to sing his special song. This song has been handed down through the generations from father to son but our young hero has no father and so no role model. He goes in search of a song but none are right and in fact he cannot even make the sounds of the other birds. He hears a friar-bird, a currawong, and an eastern rosella. Note the pattern of three. Then he sees a park ranger attaching a curious box to a tree and from this box he hears a sweet song.

"It whistled and warbled. The melody soon filled the forest. It bounced off the trees, skimmed across the billabongs and echoed through the woodlands. The song sounded familiar and it made Regent's heart feel warm inside."

Looking at the science - the total population of regent honeyeaters was estimated to be only 1500 individuals in 2000 while today it is around 350-400. The male attracts a female with a unique song. Land clearing, farming and urban development have damaged the honeyeaters woodland habitat. Scientists have begun a captive breeding program in conjunction with the Traditional Owners of Wonnarua country. 

Image source: Local Land services Central West

Read more:
Australian Geographic: The road to saving Australia’s regent honeyeaters

Environment NSW

Birdlife Australia - hear their song

ABC news 1st July, 2023

The art is based on photos and other materials. The colours used by Jess Racklyeft are joyous.

Image source: Instagram

There is extensive back matter provided in this book. A timeline of the regent honeyeater from 60,000 years ago up to 2022. The regent honeyeater is listed as critically endangered but researchers are now using recordings of their song in the hope they will teach this to other birds in the wild. There is also a glossary and a page of artist credits which I found especially fascinating. 

The Forgotten Song is exquisitely beautiful, with both words and illustrations seeming to ooze hope, ingenuity and wonder. ... The mixed media illustrations have been created with a cheerful and energising colour palette; some with the subtle inclusion of historic habitat photos. ... organic speech bubbles that contain the perfect markings and colours for different birds to sing and dance across the page. These gorgeous representations will make you hear bird calls inside your head! Kids' Book Review

So this lyrical, beautifully illustrated story is another brilliant wake-up call for young readers not only about the impact of urban sprawl on this species in particular, but on our birdlife generally. The Bottom Shelf  Click this review to see a short video about the Regent Honeyeater. 

I am going to make a bold call and say I think I have found a book for the 2024 CBCA Eve Pownall notables, short list (and maybe this will even be the winner). Huge congratulations to CSIRO publishing on another splendid book for our Australian children. On their page you can see inside this book, read reviews and there is a link to the teachers notes. 

Companion books:

I excited to see this new book illustrated by Jess Racklyeft:

AND in 2021 we were sent The Book for Happy Hearts illustrated by Jess Racklyeft for our CBCA judging. The Picture Book team sent it on to Younger Readers but sadly it did not make their notable list.  I highly recommend this book as one you should add to your school library. Jess won the CBCA Picture Book of the Year award in 2022 for her book Iceberg. 

Coral Vass also has some splendid books including Jorn's Magnificent Imagination; Grandma's treasured shoes; and Sorry Day.

Picture Books are for everyone! A new Australian database from NCACL.

Did you see Sonam and the Silence when it was published in 2019?  This is one of those very special picture books to share with a group of older students. In my review I said: Sonam and the Silence is an important book and an emotional and uplifting story.

This is just one example of a truly special picture book that should be shared with senior primary and junior high school students. There are so many more. Our wonderful National Centre for Australian Children's Literature have been working very hard over the last eighteen months to find and annotate all our Australian picture books for older readers. They found more than two hundred of them. I first mentioned this project back in October, 2022.  This week they launched their newest database. 

NCACL is very proud of our new database and believe it will make a significant contribution to the teaching of literature and visual literacy. ... The database entries cover an extensive range of subjects, literary devices and techniques and a wide range of artistic styles. Ruth Nitschke Project Manager Reading Picture-Drawing Words Picture Books for Older Readers

One of the parts of my former library that I am most proud of is the separate shelves I made of senior picture books. I used SO many of these in my teaching with students in Grades 5 and 6 (here is my Pinterest collection) and while not all of them were Australian it is exciting to see just how many books The National Centre for Australian Children's Literature (NCACL) have found - 240 fabulous books.

The National Centre for Australian Children's Literature explain the focus and scope of this project. These details are from their flyer:

Picture books can be read on several levels and interpreted differently depending on the audience. They can be suitable for more than one audience simultaneously and assist students in becoming competent in image analysis and identifying storytelling devices. Books selected for this database are often more sophisticated with different levels of meaning. Such books may:

• provide alternatives to text-only books

• offer books for image analysis

• assist in developing multi-literacy and visual literacy

• analyse different types of literature including post-modernism

• introduce methods for decoding the integration of words and pictures

• analyse artistic techniques and styles as well as book design and layout

• study literary devices and intertextual references aimed at older readers

• examine multiple narratives

• attract reluctant readers, EAL/D students and those with language diffculties

• offer non-traditional plot structure and metafictional devices

• examine sensitive topics including death, war, violence and societal issues

• attract readers who find picture books suit their needs and interests

• provide useful tools for introducing thematic units of work

Each books has the following details:

Bibliographic details; Australian Curriculum Codes; a suggested audience; a list of subjects; an annotation with a plot summary and other details; and links to teaching resources.

So many details provided for every book makes this an enormously rich resource. AND you can search by title, author, illustrator, publisher, publication date, subject, audience and Australian Curriculum code. This is so impressive. 

Take a look at this database user guide from NCACL.  Belle Alderman Director of NCACL spoke with the Storybox Library. Belle mentions another splendid NCACL resource - verse novels.

So many of my own favourite books are included. You can search for each of these by title using my side bar:

If you search for your favourite author such as Margaret Wild or Gary Crew, both of whom are our IBBY Australia Hans Christian Andersen award nominees, you can see all of their picture books for older readers in the database.

Barbara Braxton on her blog The Bottom Shelf says:  With the enormous popularity of graphic novels, we know our students respond to illustrated books that do not present as a wall of daunting text, particularly in a world dominated by screens, so the perception that picture books are for very young children who are not yet reading independently is, thankfully, disappearing and the power of the picture book to explore and explain difficult concepts, especially those that are not the common lived experience, is being acknowledged for what it is. (Note a few of the books used as a heading for Barbara's post are not included in the NCACL database because the focus is Australian picture books for older readers - not international titles). 

Disclaimer One - I did contribute to this database. My annotations were for My Dog (John Heffernan); Yahoo Creek (Tohby Riddle); Azaria (Maree Coote); The Watertower (Gary Crew) and Suri's Wall (Lucy Estela). AND there are also links to a handful of my blog posts in the database.

Disclaimer Two - I am not yet able to talk about the Children's Book Council of Australia 2023 short listed picture books because I was a judge for this category. Several of these titles are in the database, as you would expect, so after Book Week and the winners and honour books are announced I can add those details to this post. 

Missuk's Snow Geese by Anne Renaud illustrated by Geneviève Côté

Litte Missuk lives in the far north of Canada. Her father carves soap stone pieces into animals and Missuk longs to learn how to do this but for now she will have to wait because her father needs to set off hunting for caribou. Missuk fills in her day sewing new mittens with her mother and then trying a little carving project but she is so restless. Outside the air is warm but the land is covered in snow. The sky is vast and lying on her back in the snow she sees a flock of migrating snow geese. Missuk makes up a game of lying in the snow and leaving bird-shaped imprints along the trail taken by her father that morning.

Late in the day and into the evening her father does not return. Missuk goes to bed and while she does sleep her dreams become nightmares as her imagination wonders if her father has had an accident or if the husky dogs are trapped in broken ice. Eventually her father does return. He is cold and very tired but once he recovers he explains how he did become lost in a snow storm but close to home he found something special.

"I would have been lost had I not come upon a trail of goose shapes stamped into the snow. Those birds led me across the tundra and up to a hilltop from where I saw our igloo. This is how I found my way home."

Missuk's Snow Goose was published in 2008 so sadly it is out of print but I was pleased to see it was featured in our NSW School magazine in 2019. I picked up this book because I like the illustrations by Geneviève Côté. Here is an interview with Seven impossible Things.

Côté’s watercolor-wash and charcoal pictures warmly illuminate the family’s emotional connection against a harshly beautiful landscape that teems with wildlife. Kirkus

I previously talked about Ella May and the Wishing Stone by Cary Fagan illustrated by Genevieve Cote.

This week IBBY Canada released a wonderful list of Indigenous Picture Books. We are so lucky here in Australia that we speak English and so we can enjoy books from Canada.

Take a look at the three lists - 2018, 2021 and 2023. If you are in Australia you might like to hunt out books illustrated by Julie Flett, Qin Leng, and Soyeon Kim.

When I worked in Canada in 1994 one of my projects was to collect one picture book from each province. I almost completed this task. Here are some of the books I bought home. I have given a few away over the years so there are a few titles I have forgotten (sadly):

If You're Not from the Prairie by David Bouchard illustrated by Henry Ripplinger

Mary of Mile 18 by Ann Blades

Belle's Journey by Marilyn Reynolds illustrated by Stephen McCallum

Last Leaf First Snowflake to fall by Leo Yerza

Oh, Canada by Ted Harrison

Baseball bats for Christmas by Michael Kusugak illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka

A horse called Farmer by Peter Cumming illustrated by P. John Burden

The Mummers Song by Bud Davidge illustrated by Ian Wallace

A Prairie Alphabet by Jo Bannatyne-Cugnet illustrated by Yvette Moore Montréal