Halloween in the library

We did a bit of decorating of the library foyer for Halloween, to promote reading - according to the students, it's 'cool', so that's a nice accolade.   It wasn't hard to fill the bookcase with fantasy/magic/spooky/wizardly books, although I must admit to a soft spot for Anticraft: Knitting, beading and stitching for the slightly sinister...

We made the bookmarks you can see in one of the pictures (I use Publisher, and have a preset blank I've made and saved on which I put the current theme) and the pennants and tags.  One of my co-workers had the pumpkin light, and that was where it all started... No lollies, and we stayed away from the icky end of it.  Lights, corndolly decorations and beads from Ikea, fabric and little skeletons/spiders from Spotlight, large skeleton from a two dollar shop, cardboard is standard colours, fonts sourced from the site I mentioned here, Twilight poster from Dolly, a couple of book promo pieces gifted by the lovely local independent bookshop.  The Ikea stuff and fabric were the most expensive ingredients (and also reusable), while the rest is largely ingenuity and time.  We'll box it up next week and have some more fun next year. 

My favourite of our slogans:

The TRICK with reading:

TREAT yourself to a book (from your school library).

What's a girl to read?

Justine Henning, in an article in the NY Times, lists 12 notable books for girls, asks, What's a Girl to Read?

To quote:

Parents and other adults in these novels usually fail to prevent young people from acting out — with variously comic or tragic consequences. Yet their authors recognize the developing moral intelligence of both their characters and their audience, producing stimulating books for young readers (that parents might even enjoy).

• Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging: Confessions of Georgia Nicolson, by Louise Rennison. Be More Chill, by Ned Vizzini.
• Breakout, by Paul Fleischman.
• The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler.
• Feeling Sorry for Celia, by Jaclyn Moriarty.
• Flipped, by Wendelin Van Draanen.
• The Friends, by Rosa Guy.
• If You Come Softly, by Jacqueline Woodson.
• Life Is Funny, by E. R. Frank.
  Looking for Alaska, by John Green.
• Luna, by Julie Anne Peters.
• Make Lemonade, by Virginia Euwer Wolff.
• Rules of the Road, by Joan Bauer.
• Sandpiper, by Ellen Wittlinger.
• The Skin I'm In, by Sharon G. Flake.
• Someone Like You, by Sarah Dessen.
• Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson.
• Tears of a Tiger, by Sharon Draper.
• Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume.
• Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld.

But go and read her article - she provides a summary of each book with age-range recommendations, plus additional useful web links. It's from 2006, but I hadn't come across it till recently. So maybe you hadn't come across it either. Till now.

Conversely, Naomi Wolf expresses concern, in another NYT article, about Gossip Girl books and similar series. To quote:

The "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" series — the most successful in a crowded field of Au Pairs, It Girls and other copycat series — represent a new kind of young adult fiction, and feature a different kind of heroine. In these novels, which have dominated the field of popular girls' fiction in recent years, Carol Gilligan's question about whether girls can have "a different voice" has been answered — in a scary way.

and she concludes:

The great reads of adolescence have classically been critiques of the corrupt or banal adult world. It's sad if the point of reading for many girls now is no longer to take the adult world apart but to squeeze into it all the more compliantly. Sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.

And if you click here, you'll find ten questions readers of Wolf's essay posed, and how they were answered.

What is a girl to read?

Australia film: Set to Screen Podcasts

As part of the publicity and buzz around Baz Luhrmann's new film, Australia, there's an educational component involving podcasts and creative challenges for students.  To quote from that website:

Learn moviemaking from a master.



Great movies are full of adventure, and Australia, the next film from Oscar-nominated director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet), is no exception. But making a movie is an even bigger adventure—an adventure in creativity—and with the Apple Set to Screen Series, you can be a part of it.

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce you to another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more. You’ll get insights from the artists at work on Australia, watch them in action, view footage the rest of the world hasn’t seen yet, and follow along as the movie comes together.

Start your journey now.


Subscribe to the Set to Screen Series, and iTunes will automatically download each new episode that’s posted. Once you’ve watched an episode, come back here to check out the notes about the featured member of the production team, and—if there’s a challenge for that episode—get all the details you’ll need to participate.



Image source.

Things a teacher librarian can't do: No. 1

Supply four (new) YA vampire romances a week to Twilight enthusiasts looking for another hit....

Although we do our best to point them in the direction of other books they may enjoy - they narrowcast and I'm trying to expand their range (eg. Maximum Ride series).  But I've got a couple of particularly voracious readers who are reading faster than I can buy, and I suspect faster than authors are writing.   Of course in the adult vampire romance stakes, there are a number of quite voluminous series by several authors.  Local library time...

It's lovely that they know there's a hit they can only get from reading a book.

Fiction Friday: Dairy Queen

Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Read this one in the holidays, and it was great fun.  DJ Schwenk is like Josephine Alibrandi, a voice leaping off the page, a first person narrator who keeps you reading.  Like Josie, she's not always reliable - reflecting how her understanding changes over the course of the summer.  Her family owns a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and with her two elder brothers having decamped to football camps (they're both star players), her father being injured, her mother working two other jobs and her younger brother collecting skulls and playing sport, much of the farm work falls on DJ's shoulders.  Then the coach of a rival town's football team, and a family friend, suggests that DJ should coach one of his players who can also help on the farm.

There's a sequel: The Off Season.

Hexadecimal Colour Codes

When I switched the background colour of this blog to pink, in the coding what changed was its six digit hexadecimal colour code. If you'd like to see more colours than you'd imagined, and their codes, take a squizz here.

To quote from the page:

This page demonstrates the six-digit hexadecimal representation of color of the form #RRGGBB, where RR, GG, and BB are the hexadecimal values for the red, green, and blue values of the color. Using a hexadecimal code is the most reliable of the several ways you can define colors in HTML or style sheets.

PS. I could have gone into the blog template and changed the colour in the html forest there, but instead I used an option from the WSYWG layout mode in Blogger - (What You See is What You Get) because it's easier. If you know about these codes, though, you have an idea of what to look for if you do go into the forest...

Online presence: who finds you and why

One of the fascinations of compiling this blog is toddling over to see how people find it.  I'd like, of course, to think that it's morning-coffee-reading for charming teacher librarians.  Yup.  Except there's that problem of if you do get morning coffee, amid the busy life of  a school library.

The site gets on average about three dozen visits a day, and around fifty page views.  When I look at the referrals, the vast majority are people who've googled their way here.  Not TLs, but folks with questions.  And if they're coming here from Google, it means that this site is usually on the first page of Google's hits for the query being entered (eg. twilight fonts).  In case you didn't know, Google ranks pages by what you could call a usefulness logarithm - if people link to it or click to it, the more links/clicks the more useful the site is presumed to be, and the higher it travels up the Google rankings.

I've done nothing to advance or hinder this.  I write what I write, blog an entry for pretty much every weekday of school terms, and let it stand on the net as a source.  I've blogged about a variety of things, under the general umbrella of teacher librarianship, and I find them all over, in online and print sources I read, things I hear: the flypaper mind and scavenging soul of a teacher librarian/hunter-gatherer, collating rather than originating (pause while I ponder the amusement of this entry actually being original, rather than collation!).  But this entry isn't about my genius, or presumed genius, or possible genius, or anything like that.

I'm fascinated by the fact that a modest, unpublicised blog can create the presence it has in search engines.  A proportion has been fortuitous - I happened to be blogging about Twilight in various ways just as its popularity went stratospheric.  But the hits are far from being all Twilight-related.  For Melina Marchetta's new book, Finnikin of the Rock, the entry on this blog is on the first page if you google.  And that's just one example.  Day by day, entry by entry, this blog becomes a resource, a reference, and not necessarily in ways one has thought of, planned for or intended.  Brick by brick, you don't always see the potential castle.

The take-home point of this musing is to consider how this applies to our kids, and the presence/s they build online.  How easy or not their work may be to find.  How it presents them - good light?  bad light?  How quickly something can be so findable worldwide.  Although I haven't tried it, the question of how eradicable (or not) such a presence may be.  And points like that.  So if you've come here for the Twilight fonts, here's the link.  If you're a teacher librarian, there's a take-home point I hope you find useful/thought-provoking too.

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