Here is the reality of teaching

Terrific article in today's Sydney Morning Herald, from Leon Wright who teaches in western Sydney.  My favourite paragraph from "Waves of guff wash over the modern teacher" is this one:

Here is the reality. This morning, tens of thousands of teachers will go to work. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. There are motherly types, coaches, IT experts, role models, adventurers, martinets, inspirers, storytellers, social workers, academics, craftsmen, performers and, of course, a few time servers, incompetents and babes in the woods. Only the gullible and ambitious among them will uncritically embrace the passing fads. The rest will just get on with it.

But it's all worth reading.  Smart observation, this:

Once you have begun teaching, there is no let-up. At staff development days, we watch highly paid experts give presentations on how the judicious use of painted egg cartons and paper clips has transformed education in Barbados. We invariably apply one jaundiced criterion to evaluate this stuff: would it work with my year 9 class on a Friday afternoon?


Read it all:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/waves-of-guff-wash-over-the-weary-teacher-20110619-1g9yu.html
 
Cheers
 
Ruth
 
to whom some, but not all, of the above descriptions apply.
 
Found via the paper paper: the SMH as broadsheet, while I scarfed down a quick sandwich before a lesson with Year 7.  Seize the day (and the lunch!)
 

Newspaper Map: find, translate, read

How cool is this?

Every balloon is a different newspaper, the languages indicated by colour.  You can use the hand icon to move around the map (so yes, it does have Australia).

Great, you say, but what if I only speak English?

No worries.

Let's try an example There's a little Spanish balloon in the middle of the sea of English in the US.  When you click on it, you can choose the language in which you wish to read that newspaper.  Sure, Google Translate ain't perfect, but it's not bad.

Lots of ways this could be handy!  Let your teachers know... http://newspapermap.com/

Found via Twitter: @newsfromtengrrl who posts lots of useful links.

Cheers

Ruth

Screenshot images from the site.

Blue eyes, brown eyes: Jane Elliott's exercise in prejudice

Photo used under Creative Commons license.  LINK

 Jane Elliott, a teacher, first tried her blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise with her class in an Iowa school in the 1960s, in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King.  You may have come across mention of it in your teacher training, or after.  While Wikipedia isn't the be-all and end-all of research, it's not a bad source for an outline of what she did, and what happened next (and check the citation list for further links).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

Photo used under Creative Commons license.  LINK

This came up at school recently when one of the seniors, from a Society and Culture class studying belief systems and associated -isms was asking me to help her locate information*.  Blue-eyed/brown-eyed came up in the discussion, and while looking for information we came across this 29 page pdf which covers the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise and after in great useful detail (the Wikipedia article seems likely to have drawn on it, and it's not Stephen G. Bloom's only article on this topic).  Find it here:

Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes:

The Experiment that Shocked the Nation

And Turned a Town Against its Most Famous Daughter

By Stephen G. Bloom

http://www.uiowa.edu/~poroi/seminars/2004-5/bloom/poroi_paper.pdf

Here's an interesting fact from that document:

It was Jane, for instance, who complained to the Crayola Company about its single flesh-color crayon, and today there are ten flesh-color crayons — from ebony to sand. It was Jane who complained to pantyhose companies about nudecolored pantyhose, and today there are dozens of nude shades hosiery companies manufacture.

I have tried a version of this exercise with a senior class, some years ago: not as intensely/intensively as Jane; but it still had a distinct impact on the kids, got them talking and thinking. 

So, a link to share with your History/English/Society and Culture teachers, or any you think might find it useful.  Seemed a waste not to blog it.

The student also went away with a copy of The Wave, by Morton Rhue, a fictionalised version of a similar exercise.  Lots of different ways to approach and consider an idea.

Cheers

Ruth

* when we'd finished this discussion, the student remarked that the Pew Internet research site I'd referred her to for an earlier assignment had been just what she needed, so she had come back to me.  Nice to get repeat business from confident customers! - I hadn't remembered that occasion, as we have so many kids here and it's hard to recall every detail of every day's discussions and conversations.  I appreciated knowing.  The happy life of teacher librarians: repeat business from happy customers!



GIFSL* 65: from top stand-up comedians. Yes, really!

Photo used under a Creative Commons license

I am happy to get ideas and inspiration from wherever I can find them, and so clicked through on a Twitter link to read Michael Bierut's design column on Seven Things Designers Can Learn From Stand Up Comics.

What did I find?  Seven things teacher librarians re-imagining their libraries and looking for design ideas and inspiration and all sorts of things can learn from stand up comics.  Really truly.

This is the brief version, with my own comments. 

1. It's all about the basics.  Librarywise, stuff being shelved and findable.  A welcoming, helpful atmosphere and friendly staaff.  A library that encourages and inspires.  Resources and services that the kids want and need.  You know.  So do the kids
2. Once you've mastered the basics, make the work your own.  Every school library, like every classroom, bears the stamp of the personality of the teacher/teacher librarian in charge of it and responsible for it.  The art and science of teaching is a juggle of personality and knowledge and human relations and all sorts of other alchemies.  I know, in another library space, that I wouldn't do exactly what I have done at my present school.  I know that another teacher librarian, in my current library, wouldn't do things the same either.  It's not about better or worse, but different.  Playing to your strengths, with the goal of making it as effective as you can for the kids.
3. Respect your audience.  That's kids, and teachers, and parents.  Kids, because sometimes they're so easy to respect, and sometimes difficult to respect: although I have found that exquisite, courteous interest from a teacher librarian can completely discombobulate a noxious student, opening the way to achieving a positive outcome for both.  Teachers can be irritating (late and lost resources, forgotten bookings etc) but like anything, there's a story both sides (teacher librarians can be irritating too: let me count the ways...or not; you know).  I'm not keen on a them and us mentality.  It's us, all teachers (whether teacher librarians or other classroom teachers) working together.
4. Know your tools.  The standard stuff - cataloguing and other organisational tools.  The teaching tools - methods and strategies and ideas.  More resources in print and digital form and more than we have ever had before.  The tools of character and style - patience, interest in kids, enthusiasm... We have a huge toolkit, as big and Tardis-like as the mother's bag in the Swiss Family Robinson (I've never forgotten that - whatever they needed, she'd popped in that sailcloth bag before the shipwreck).
5. Honour your craft.  Work hard, create challenges for yourself, aim to never coast and always improve.  Use your personal learning network, your willingness to be a lifelong learner hunting out new ideas from blogs, Twitter, email lists, the media, anywhere you can. 
6. Don't be afraid of failure.  Not everything I try works out.  Last week I planned an exciting lesson and realistically, on reviewing how it went, would barely give myself a pass grade.  And a prac teacher watched it.  So, why didn't it work as well as I'd planned and hoped?  How can I do better?  If we don't model coping with failure, valuing failure, using it as a launch pad, how can we expect kids to learn how important it is, learn to be resilient, learn to be brave?
7. Finally, never forget you have a special gift.  How much fun is it to work in a school library?  Huge fun!  Barack Obama in a speech to librarians some years ago, talked about libraries as being a magic threshold.  We not only get to cross that magic threshold each day, we get to influence the experience of everyone who crosses it too.  Teaching is an amazing gift - that alchemy when it works, the pleasure of the company of so many different, engaging personalities and dreams and ideas.  Lucky lucky lucky (as I remind myself on the days when I end up tired and dispirited; because tomorrow is another day, and plenty of good things happen even on the tough days).

Click on to read the article in full here, with Michael Bierut's designer observations rather than my teacher librarianish ones:
http://observersroom.designobserver.com/oblog/post/seven-things-designers-can-learn-from-stand-up-comics/27038/

Cheers

Ruth

*GIFSL= good ideas for school libraries.  An ongoing series on this blog.  Find more of them by clicking here.

2011 APA book cover design winners

Among the children and young adult book cover winners at the 2011 Australian Publishers' Association awards, you can find:

Best designed children's cover of the year

Best designed children's fiction book

Joint winners of the best-designed children's nonfiction book

Best designed children's picture book

Best designed children's series

Best designed young adult book

Best designed secondary education book

See all the awards, adult and children's, with the authors/designers and all on Fancy Goods, the Bookseller and Publisher magazine's blog here:

http://www.fancygoods.com.au/fancy-goods/2011/05/20/2011-apa-book-design-awards-winners/

It's interesting to see what gets industry awards like these; they're not always the ones the kids grab first. I'm sometimes hugely disappointed in book covers - the blurb sounds promising but the cover just ain't gonna grab the customers.  We get some great ones, but others (if I know that what's inside is worth the work) I'll do my best to hand-sell; but I can't hand-sell everything, and covers certainly matter.

One book I wish someone would re-issue with a modern, appealing cover is a teenage fiction book called, "A time to love, a time to mourn" by Paige Dixon (which I think was originally published with a title like, "Will you cross my golden river?".  It's a superb, well written family story, an unsentimental tearjerker - I still have a copy in the library, but it's a hard hard sell, so dated does the cover look.  Any publisher listening - ???

Congratulations to all those involved in the books above.

Cheers

Ruth

Film/Movie news: The Hunger Games

Tintin may be out at the end of 2011, but you'll have to wait till the end of 2012 for the film being made of Suzanne Collins' very successful book, The Hunger Games.  I have five copies of this in the library (and two or three of the sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay) and they are constantly either out or on reserev - it would be one of the most popular books in the library at present (five copies tells you that, doesn't it?).  Some of the kids are already starting to talk about the film.

Here's a glimpse of Jennifer Lawrence, who has been cast as Katniss:

Source is http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20493206,00.html.  She got great reviews in Winter's Bone.

There are several people on Twitter who are avidly following (and tweeting about) the film - casting, locations and more.  @HungerGamesExam is one of them.  She also has a website here with regular updates.  Filming has started, but I'm guessing any trailer is a fair way off.  But it will come...

Cheers

Ruth

What does a writer do? (great sources on Twitter)

Photo:This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License LINK

I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more significant.

JOHN CHEEVER

Found this excellent quote via @AdviceToWriters on Twitter.  For the teacher librarian, as having a place full of written stuff (in print and digital form) and English teachers (who teach creative writing), there are some useful people to follow on Twitter for information/ideas/inspiration about writing.  Microblogging (such as Twitter) = short snapshots of information, quick to read and investigate and use or skip over, depending on what interests you.

Some other folk who tweet about writing:

@elizabethscraig: check her stream of tweets for all sorts of useful links about writing eg.:
Elizabeth S Craig @elizabethscraig
5 ways to avoid an info dump: http://bit.ly/kvLUMo #amwriting


SydneyWritersCentre @SydneyWriters
26/05/11 4:43 PM
10 ways to completely screw up your novel: http://bit.ly/lm5fi7  #amwriting

This is not the only writers' centre (in Australia or overseas) with a Twitter presence.  Some post more about their centre's events, but others include writing advice tweets to, that you can use in teaching English.  Hunt for them on Twitter, or by googling their sites and checking to see if they are on Twitter.

OZ SF+F Writers Assc @awritingjourney
26/05/11 4:19 PM
The ASFFWA Daily is out! http://bit.ly/fzVIKj  ▸ Top stories today via @bloomsburysyd @harpernz @bothersomewords @shearersbooks

The Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Assoc regularly tweets useful stuff.  This tweet is one about their "Daily".  Some folk on Twitter use a site such as paper.li to collate tweets from their twitter stream (ie. tweets from people they follow and are interested in) into a digital newspaper.  So if you follow the ASFFWA Daily link in this tweet, you are getting pre-sifted/curated content focused on topics that tweeter is interested in; so if you're interested in what they are, you're getting the benefit of their twitter stream.

And of course many authors are on Twitter: their Twitter streams can be extremely various: as varied indeed as the writers themselves.  Best idea is to follow ones that might interest you, and if you're not finding their tweets useful/engaging, then unfollow them.  Some writers will tweet everything from what they had for breakfast (that Twitter stereotype) to stuff about their writing process.  Some will be more focused on writing.  Stephen Fry's tweets (he's one of the most followed people on Twitter and tweets often) cover an extensive range of topics, daily life, thoughts, ideas.  You can't make a writer write what they want, in books or anywhere else; on Twitter, if you follow them, you have to accept that they write what they do.  Neil Gaiman @neilhimself has a lot of followers and tweets on a range of topics: he was one writer tweeting about the interrogation of teacher librarians in LA.

There are writers whose books I adore and whose blogs I find unreadable; and writers whose output, in whatever form, I generally find interesting.  Nowt as varied as folk.

But am I finding good information about writing via my education/professional/teaching Twitter stream that I can use with students and share with English teaching colleagues?  Yup.  You can, too.

(OK, I'll admit it: this blog entry about useful info on writing is in fact a sneak evangelical moment for the educational possibilities of Twitter).

Cheers

Ruth

@ruth_skerricks on Twitter
I'm also on Yammer, but will only be found there if you work for the same employer as I do, because that is how Yammer works.

Final Report: School Libraries and Teacher Librarians in 21st Century Australia

The final report has been released today.

The full report pdf is here:
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/ee/schoollibraries/report/fullreport.pdf

Here are its recommendations:
List of recommendations



2 Impact of recent Commonwealth Government policies and investments on school libraries


Recommendation 1


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government partner with all education authorities to fund the provision of a core set of online database resources, which are made available to all Australian schools.


Recommendation 2


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government work with the states and territories to develop a discrete national policy statement that defines the importance of digital and information literacy
for learning in the 21st century, which can be used as a guide by teachers and principals.


3 Potential of school libraries and librarians to contribute to improved educational and community outcomes


Recommendation 3


The Committee recommends that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment  and Reporting Authority include statistical information about the breakdown of all specialist teachers, including teacher librarians, on the My School website.

Recommendation 4


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government support additional initiatives to promote reading, such as a National Year of Reading. The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace
Relations should collaborate with the Australian School Library Association, Australian Libraries and Information Association and other education stakeholders in developing these initiatives.


Recommendation 5


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government initiate an Australian-based longitudinal study into the links between library programs, literacy (including digital literacy) and student achievement, including their impact on improving outcomes for socioeconomically disadvantaged students.


Recommendation 6


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government support promotional activities undertaken by ASLA and ALIA that demonstrate to the school community the valuable work that teacher librarians are doing in respect of e-learning in their schools, including those that highlight their leadership capacity.


4 Recruitment and development of teacher librarians


Recommendation 7


The Committee recommends that the rollout of the new national curriculum, which is to be made available online, include a component of training for teacher librarians.


Recommendation 8


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government commission a thorough workforce gap analysis of teacher librarians across Australian schools.


Recommendation 9


The Committee recommends that the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, through the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs, establish a national dialogue, including with tertiary providers, on the role of teacher librarians today in schools and into the future. The dialogue should include an examination of the adequacy of the pathways into the profession and ongoing training requirements.


xx


5 Partnering and supporting school libraries and teacher librarians


Recommendation 10


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government, through the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood and Youth Affairs, discuss ways to enhance partnerships with state and territory and local levels of government to support school libraries and teacher librarians.


Recommendation 11


The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government partner with ASLA and ALIA to produce a document that showcases some of the successful partnerships and programs between school
libraries and other libraries, and joint-use libraries. The document should be made available to government and non-government education authorities and school principals.

The whole report is 180 pages plus.  Haven't yet had time today to read/digest, but certainly will.

Cheers

Ruth

Whose life is it anyway? - a transplant story

I subscribe to several free weekly newsletters from the New York Times - health, books, movies.  The health one this week included an article about one family's willingness to allow their loved one's death to become the opportunity for transplants for others.  And on Monday this week I'd had a senior English class in looking for material on medical ethics/issues in relation to their study of the play Whose life is it anyway?.  Serendipity?  Dunno, but I've joined the dots and the teacher is very happy to have an additional resource.

The article includes a video of the (unusual) meeting between the donor's widow and the people who received transplanted organs, as well as an illustration/graphic about transplantation.

Permalink to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/health/17organ.html

One to pass on to your English and PDHPE teachers?

Cheers

Ruth

Pecha Kucha: 20 web 2.0 tools in 20 slides

Pip Cleaves from the DET presented this PechaKucha at the MANTLE teacher librarian conference in Newcastle last week.  In the PechaKucha format of 20 slides, with 20 seconds for each, she covered a bunch of web 2.0 tools you might like to explore.

Mantle Conference 13th May, 2011

View more presentations from Pip Cleaves

Here's the link in case the above doesn't work for you:
http://www.slideshare.net/piphowell/mantle-conference-13th-may-2011-7938859

Cheers

Ruth

How do I write a resume, miss?

From Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

She couldn't find the Careers Adviser, so I was her next port of call.  "How do I write a resume, miss?  I have one, but I don't think it's very good, and I want a better part-time job."

OK.  Some quick searching later, and we landed on the Youth Central site from the Victorian government and hit paydirt:

• An outline of what to include in a resume
• A list of sample resumes covering various situations (eg. some work experience/none, finished school/not)
• And here's the sample she's working with - not finished school but some work experience.

The samples can be downloaded as pdfs or as Word files.

She went away happy.  I've bunged it on here so it can be useful for others.  It's all good.

This site looked useful too: http://www.how-to-write-a-resume.org/

Cheers

Ruth

Earth Clock

Found this here:
http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks/earthclock/

There are a bunch more free embeddable clocks and applets on the site.  Useful for Science, Social Science, Geography etc.

Cheers

Ruth

The secret life of libraries

(The Mitchell Library in Sydney:: photo used under Creative Commons license)

From various sources on my Twitter stream, I have been following the stories about library closures in the UK.  The Guardian has a thoughtful, thought-provoking and sometimes rather amusing article about the secret life of libraries; it's by Bella Bathurst.  They have always had a dusty image – and never more so than now – but libraries are at the heart of our communities. With the axe about to fall, Bella Bathurst reveals just what we're about to lose.

Some more quotes:

Discussing the types of books stolen in various parts of the country, she observes: among all communities and in all parts of Britain, our old passion for self-improvement remains vivid.
...
But the cuts also underscore a deeper confusion about what libraries are: what they do, who they serve, and – in an age where the notion of books itself seems mortally flawed – why we still need them. What's the point of buildings filled with print? Isn't all our wisdom electronic now? Shouldn't libraries die at their appointed time, like workhouses and temperance halls?
...
The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection.
...

(Seattle Public Library::photo used under Creative Commons license)

...reading seems to be becoming an increasingly alien concept for children. "The pace of life is different now, and people expect art to happen to them. Music and film do that, a CD will do that, but you have to make a book happen to you. It's between you and it. People can be changed by books, and that's scary. When I was working in the school library, I'd sometimes put a book in a kid's hands and I'd feel excited for them, because I knew that it might be the book that changed their life. And once in a while, you'd see that happen, you'd see a kind of light come on behind their eyes. Even if it's something like 0.4% of the population that that ever happens to, it's got to be worth it, hasn't it?"

The article concludes thus:
The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.


It's a terrific article, very much worth reading in its entirety.  I want to think some more about its ideas, such as connection, and conversation, and art happening, the sort of engagement involved in the act of reading.  This week, as every week, I will have the joy and pleasure and sheer bloody fun of putting a book in the hands of a kid and watching their eyes light up, or (they are teenagers after all) their body language just relax that small bit that is (in reality) a decibels-loud acknowledgement that the book and the transaction and the library were good things for them.  And so many of them have fabulous smiles, don't they?
 
Cheers
 
Ruth

Bloom's Taxonomy

If you've been kicking around the education game for any time at all, Bloom's Taxonomy would have grazed your consciousness.

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

At my regular fortnightly meeting this week with my Year 12 student mentor group - half a dozen fabulous kids! - I used this to get them thinking about how they learn, not just the ever-demanding what they learn.  We went round the table, with each nominating one subject and the level at which they thought they were currently operating in that subject.  From thinking about themselves, and considering the answers of their colleagues, it gave them food for thought.

I used the version I found here. (There are a whole bunch of great links and content on that site about study skills).  It includes very handy lists of verbs associated with each level in the taxonomy; verbs that the students could link to the wording/requirements of questions/assignments etc. 

For senior students, there is real value in encouraging them to take that step back to consider how they learn, and thus how they might develop/improve, and Bloom's Taxonomy is but one tool that helps this process.

Cheers

Ruth

PS I know the picture (taken using Hipstamatic!) is a pretty bad pun - but at least it's pretty!

Holidays.... and learners inheriting the earth

Well, you can tell the last week of term went by in a gallop!  Not a peep from this direction - too busy with everything else!

Also, I do love the tentacle in the last blog entry.  So very much.

A bonbon to leave with you to tide you over till the holidays end.




Will Richardson at TEDxNY in March 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni75vIE4vdk

A screenshot of my favourite slide from his presentation: a quote I was using years ago, and which still (despite all that has changed) applies.

If you're on holidays too, enjoy.  If not, we will for you.  Ain't that kind?!

Cheers

Ruth

NSW public schools resume on the Wednesday after Easter for teachers, and the Thursday for students.

A beginner's guide to steampunk (+ a tentacle)

Abebooks.com, a large online second-hand bookselling site, has a useful beginner's guide to steampunk literature.

I recognised some of the titles highlighted on the page, and found others to follow up, for the school library and for me. (The image above is a screenshot - click on this link to go to the page and see it in readable detail).

The Wikipedia article on Steampunk is another place to start - not only the content, but also the links.  One of the footnotes, for example, takes you to this article from How Stuff Works, canvassing the genre and steampunk art/craft works/creations.

Searching the handmade craft site (beautiful beautiful things!) Etsy.com with the keyword 'steampunk' yields over 70,000 pieces of jewellery, clothing and more reflecting the steampunk aesthetic (as this screenshot demonstrates - what you see will vary constantly as items are sold and new items listed).

Cheers

Ruth

PS. If you narrow your Etsy search on steampunk to the most expensive items in the 'geekery - weird' category, you get some corkers.

I think the wall tentacle is my favourite.  Wouldn't that be a talking point in a school library??? (hmmm, would need to be on a high wall so it didn't put a student's eye out...!!)

Creating effective surveys

I've just been compiling/creating the evaluation survey for the senior study skills program for Year 11 in which I've been involved through this term.

SurveyMonkey (mentioned previously on this blog) is what I've been using; the school has subscribed to this so we can create more detailed surveys than the free option allows (note that there is a free option, though!).

Toddling around the FAQ, I discovered that there is a fabulous freebie there, an information booklet pdf, Smart Survey Design.

Here's what that text says under the title:

This guide provides information on writing successful and effective survey questions, creating survey flow and layout, calculating response rates, tips for increasing response rates, and the pros and cons of online surveys. (Plus an appendix of links and works cited for additional help in survey design.)

And doesn't that sound handy-dandy for all those students in subjects like Society and Culture who create surveys as part of the process involved in their PIPs (personal interest projects) etc?

I've filled out some doozies for those (teacher librarians being notoriously easy to find at break times/study periods, so they can be asked to fill in surveys).  My fave are the ones that divide the world into ages in this kind of style:

• 12-13
• 14-15
• 16-17
• 18-23
• over 23

(because over 23 is, of course, OLD!  Sometimes they might go, 24-30, 40-60... Bless!)

I'll be popping this link on over to the Society and Culture teachers, and any others with subjects where the kids have to compile surveys.

Cheers

Ruth

Writing activities aplenty!

Digging around for some material on behalf of one of our English teachers, I came across Linley Stace's blog - in particular, her excellent collection of blog entries on writing activities.  She lives in Australia and this is how she describes her blog:

This is a blog about writing and reading, with an emphasis on New Zealand and Australian fiction. I am especially interested in short fiction, approaching stories from a writing point of view rather than a strictly literary one. Also a place for my random opinions on movies, books and stuff.


One worth sharing with your English teacher colleagues (the one I was helping was very excited!).

I've also been following @AdviceToWriters on Twitter; check out the website with often concise, pointed and from-real-writers advice here: http://www.advicetowriters.com/.

Cheers

Ruth

Rick Riordan's new book: sneak peek chapter

If your Rick Riordan fans who loved Percy Jackson have kept going with the Kane Chronicles (Red Pyramid is out, Throne of Fire is out soon) they may like to get hold of sneak peek of Throne of Fire via Amazon.  At time of writing (these things change, so don't get cranky if the freebie is gone!) you can preorder a Kindle e-book edition of "The Throne of Fire Chapter Sneak Peek" for $0 (not $18.99) and it will be delivered on May 3, 2011. 

You don't need a Kindle e-reader to read it, you can read Kindle-formatted books via iPhone app, on your PC/Mac etc - the page has links to these.

Here's the link!

Great chance to offer your students a freebie by a popular YA author.

Cheers

Ruth

Image source: Amazon, as per link above.

Display of banned books

Searching through Flickr for something else, I came across this image of a display of banned books. 

Toddle on over to the image source to see it in larger sizes, and check out what's been included. (It has a Creative Commons license).

Click here to see more of this school librarian's displays.

Click here for my recent GIFSL about displays of banned books.

Cheers

Ruth