I was just passing our picture book shelf and decided the nonfiction picture books need a bit of love and attention. Here are a few I love for their amazing illustrations and beautiful messages written all within a couple of handfuls of pages.
Picture books are so like poetry – so much can be said with so few choice words. Which reminds me of a beautiful piece I read recently about poetry by Larson Langston
In English, we say: “I miss you.” But in poetry, we say: “I trace the shape of your absence in the spaces where your laughter used to linger, and let the echoes of you fill the hollow hours.”
In English, we say: “I don’t know how to let go.” But in poetry, we say: “I carry you in my chest like a stone— heavy, unyielding, and carved with the sharp edges of what once was.”
In English, we say: “I feel lost.” But in poetry, we say: “The compass of my heart spins wildly now, its needle drawn to places it can no longer call home.”
In English, we say: “I wish it were different.” But in poetry, we say: “I water the garden of could-have-beens with tears, waiting for flowers that refuse to bloom.”
In English, we say: “I hope you’re happy.” But in poetry, we say: “May the sun that warms your days be as kind to you as the first kiss of dew on the dawning light upon the leaves of the laurel that we once made love under”
In English, we say: “You hurt me.” But in poetry, we say: “You planted thorns in my chest with hands I once trusted, and now every breath feels like an apology I shouldn’t owe.”
In English, we say: “I wanted to stay.” But in poetry, we say: “I lingered at the edge of your world, a star burning quietly, unnoticed in your vast, indifferent sky.”
In English, we say: “I’m trying to move on.” But in poetry, we say: “I untangle your name from my veins each morning, only to find it woven into my dreams again at night.”
In English, we say: “I’ll be okay.” But in poetry, we say: “I gather the shattered pieces of myself like broken glass, knowing someday, even scars can catch the light.”
With poetry I write paths through gardens of grace with words in ways my body dare not go as a whole.
Our G6 students are currently studying Ancient Greece and will soon be embarking on a week long “week without walls” trip around Greece. Besides our nonfiction books on the City States and other aspects of Ancient Greece here are some more titles the “riff on the theme”.
Of course an easy hit are those around the Greek Myths, and yesterday and today I went to the social studies classes and with a trolley full of Greek Myth books, in particular the multiple copies we have of the 12 George O’Connor Olympians series and each student could check a book out. Not depicted on the poster but one of my absolute favourites series are the “Brick Books” where various classic tales are depicted with Lego Bricks. Unfortunately many of the series are now out of print, but in previous libraries I’ve had the full set of Shakespeare plays, fairy tales etc.
When I wrote the series of blogs in December for GLLI many people asked about displays so I remembered to take a picture of a couple of our displays of last week. We have two main spaces downstairs for display, one as you walk into the library and one against the wall. So one was dedicated to ancient Greece and the other to our Ecosystems projects.
How easy it is to slip back into slothfulness – after a month of posting over at GLLI, today’s the first time I have had both the mindspace and timespace to do something on my own blog. Reading through various FB librarian spaces it seems that Romance is still doing the rounds and people are still looking for good, age appropriate romance novels that the parent-police / rabid-anti-readers / censors whatever are not going to object to, so I spent a few hours this week trying to find as many romance books as possible on Mackin.com that are rated respectively Grade 6+, Grade 7+ and Grade 8+. Now for all of you non-educators, non ex-parents of teenagers, non-working with teens people the distinction may appear ridiculous. But believe me, a 10/11 year old Grade 6 child is developmentally and emotionally ready for something quite different to a 13/14 year old. Or at least some of them / their parents and others that try to police their thoughts and reading.
I say this as an adult who has recently read “The Memory Police” by Yōko Ogawa and translated by Stephen Snyder and as a GenXer whose reading was not policed, except perhaps for “The Godfather” which my parents considered too violent, and therefor like every teen in my school read the whole sordid “Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews series” before we really fully understood what incest was all about (an aside – read this Atlantic Article about just how prevalent it was / is).
I am also living in a region where even a mention of kissing could be construed as scandalous, but with students from all sorts of parenting, cultural, religious, regional, national and linguistic backgrounds. So tightrope, people. Tightrope. While doing my research I really had to wonder what exactly was the criteria to distinguish between suitability of the various age / grade boundaries. And I’m still wondering. There is a lot of talk about the age of the protagonists and whether or not there is kissing, hand holding, other touching, sexual encounters that are graphic or non-graphic or just hinted at but nada on where the lines are.
Back to library-land – why Mackin.com – well, unlike Follett which has very broad categorisation = Grades 3-6 / 5-8, 7-10 and YA, they are a little more granular so I poured over lists and lists of romance books and came up with the posters below. Also bear in mind these are inasmuch as I am aware all heterosexual in nature, again due to where I am living and trying to breathe and exist.
In another time and space I hope to have a far more inclusive list. And read my disclaimers below on this post. There is some nice cross-over in genres as well, getting into sport / fantasy / historical fiction with a brushing of romance – very important for our male-type patrons who are more likely to entertain the thought of romance in the context of anything but realistic fiction.
Disclaimer:The views, opinions, and thoughts expressed in this blog post are solely my own and do not reflect the positions, policies, or opinions of any current or former employer. Any references or examples provided are intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as endorsements or official statements from any organization I have been associated with.
Despite appearances to the contrary I’ve actually been extremely busy blogging this month, doing a daily blog over at GLLI-US.org. Here is a summary of the month’s blogging with links to the individual blogs: ——————————-
I hope you’ve enjoyed my advent calendar type selection of “displays” for the month of December with a variety of ways to slice and dice collections and perhaps you’ve even found a few new or different books to add to your collections.
A couple of people have asked me about the how and why and wherefore of these posters, so in this wrap-up I’ll give links to the templates and also some ideas of how they are used in the various contexts. Generally all posters are put into A4 presentation books and are available in the ELA classrooms and in the library. Some selections are used for displays at the entrance of the library or on the display wall. Others are more of a “pop up” display when different classes come into the library to browse or borrow books with their classes.
Country Celebrations
Country celebration posters are sent out in our student and staff bulletins to coincide with the National Day of the various countries. I asked our Powerschool guru to run a list of all countries where we had at least 3 students having the country as their first, second or third passport, got a list of national days and worked from there. Sending out those email “birthday cards” is one of the most rewarding things I do as a librarian as I get so many thank you emails in response and students and adults coming in to borrow some of the books on the list. Depending on how busy our display space in the library is, I may or may not display the books at the library entrance.
The read around posters are shared with our teachers of various subjects and generally they print them out in A3 size and put them either on their walls, doors or display boards outside their classrooms. Sometimes, when students come into the library with their ELA or Social Studies teachers I’ll have the books laid out on tables for them to have a look at and borrow.
These and many other “Read alike” posters are printed in A4 and put into plastic “look book” presentation books that are available in the library and also in all our English Language Arts classrooms. Since our middle school students come to the library with their classes around once every 4 to 6 weeks, it makes it easy for students to browse for books in the classroom thematically and then go to the library with purpose in between the more formal library visits. When they come with their classes, I’ll generally confer with the teachers as to what they’d like displayed / what’s “hot” or wanted and then I’ll haul a bunch of tables to a part of the library where they can browse. Then these posters will be put into A3 acrylic sign holders on each table.
By Nadine Bailey – middle school teacher librarian, currently living and working in Dubai, formerly in Beijing China, Singapore and a bunch of other cities around the world. Passionate about our students seeing themselves and their worlds in literature and developing curiosity and a passion for reading and learning.
The views, opinions, and thoughts expressed in this blog post are solely my own and do not reflect the positions, policies, or opinions of any current or former employer. Any references or examples provided are intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as endorsements or official statements from any organization I have been associated with.
Mediating between curiosity and research, curriculum and pleasure By Nadine Bailey and Katie Day
In the summer of 2024 we asked International School Middle School librarians to tell us the story of nonfiction in their libraries. We wanted to know their ambitions, frustrations, organisation and display as well as their collection development and usage plans. All books recommended in this article can be found tagged in our LibraryThing Shelf (https://www.librarything.com/catalog/middleNF).
Curriculum and Research
Educators and librarians who have been around for a while know and recognise the pendulum of ideas and practice that upend things first in one direction and then another. Nonfiction is one of those things where some of the momentum is now moving back to the practice of reading subject matter in physical form. Many librarians responded that in a post-covid learning environment both they and the teachers they work with were moving back to giving information in print form – mainly books where they were available, but also printing out articles from online sites such as Britannica and Newsela in order to encourage deep reading, avoid distractions and teach nonfiction reading skills that could be later transferred to online reading.
Schools following the IBO (International Baccalaureate Organisation) programmes (PYP/MYP) had particular interest in “transdisciplinary” and cross curricula books that would offer broader perspectives on curriculum or unit themes. Many librarians were investing in books that would support inquiry into aspects of the United Nations SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). There was also a keen interest to ensure that sufficient “local” (country where the school is located) and “diverse” (countries of students’ origins) content was available in the library.
Many librarians have quite heavily weeded their nonfiction sections and are now looking to re-stock them based on this renewed interest in physical books. But it appears that publishers are not necessarily aware of what is happening on the ground and are not always updating and bringing out new editions of popular texts.
On the other hand, most respondents remarked on how much progress had been made in the last few years on the design, layout and illustrations in recent nonfiction texts. There was also a shoutout for the increase in different formats including “Oversize books” (see the books of “Big Picture Press – Welcome to the Museum”); Graphic and Manga imprints (series such HowToons; Cells at Work; and authors such as Don Brown and Jim Ottaviani); infographics (Infographic guides; ) Subject Summaries (The Big Fat Notebook series), Picture books (see this 2024 SLJ list) and Subject Overviews or introductions (DK Eyewitness, and DK Big Ideas).
Where curriculum and research is concerned, students can now often choose their favourite medium of access through a variety of formats.
Foster the flame of curiosity
Somewhere on the way to middle school, students amend their passions to fit in with their peers and ensure a sense of belonging. So out go the dinosaurs and big trucks to be replaced with their favourite sports personalities, music stars, books about their sports (soccer and basketball seem to be hits). Puberty hits this group hard and fast and strategic placement of sensitive materials can put paid to rumours and myths. It is also a time of self-absorption and worry about their physical and mental health – books on health and well being, relaxation, anxiety, meditation as well as psychology, are popular and an area of growth in most libraries.
Given the demographics of our schools, students of this age are already taking a keen interest in finance, aspects of wealth and investment as well as entrepreneurship. They’re also interested in personally exploring hobbies and activities they may see online such as cooking, sewing and knitting or other crafts.
History – particularly the world wars and more recent conflicts continue to fascinate and appal in equal measure – often mediated by historical fiction texts students may encounter in their literature studies or English classrooms and what they see on the news or social media.
Shelving, organisation and display
In order to make nonfiction appealing and accessible, quite a few of our respondents mentioned they either had or were in the process of rethinking the way that nonfiction was shelved, organised and displayed in their libraries. There is a continuum from pure DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) to a range of Book Shop or genrified models. Librarians were more interested in getting books seen and read than in a hypothetical need for their audience to be able to navigate a university library later. One of our respondents coined the lovely phrase of “emotional accessibility” in this respect.
Of course most libraries have already taken the first step of putting “literature” or novels out of a straight Dewey 800 section into a fiction collection – genrified or or not. Other common “extractions” from the main Dewey structure include:
Taking Biographies, collective biographies and memoirs out of 910/920 and putting them in a separate section. Some libraries put collective biographies at the start of the section they pertain to (i.e. famous musicians go to 780).
Travel Books
Poetry
Drama and playscripts
Graphic Novels and Manga
Narrative nonfiction
Myths, Legends and Fairytales
Parenting
Well Being
Professional Development
Sports
Country specific collections
A specific nonfiction series that’s popular
Photo: American School of Dubai MSHS Sport Section
In the absence of permanently pulling out a section – many librarians make use of rotating “dynamic shelving” or temporary topical displays. The guideline here appears to be to follow the needs and interests of the community – teenagers want to be able to independently navigate the library without adult intervention that may be embarrassing.
Photo courtesy of Ashley SimmonsPhoto courtesy of Ashley Simmons
Related to that – signage and signposting was an area that nearly all librarians were investing in. Many mentioned significant weeding that had resulted in more space for forward facing displays and carving out sections of interest.
Recommendations
To support the discovery of nonfiction titles for middle school, we’ve curated a shelf of 389 (and growing) books on Librarything that we consider to be worth investing in. It’s an ongoing labour of love, so not every book has been tagged at this point yet.
Examples of Some of the tagging we’ve employed are (not an exhaustive list):
Narrative nonfiction
Manga
Graphic
Topic_
WW2
Women
Science
Mathematics
Religion
History
Climate
SDGxx
Activism
Wellbeing
War
Technology
Sustainability
Sports
Space
Social Media
Geo_
Southeast Asia
China
USA
Europe
UK
Australia
Edition
Young Reader
Since such lists can quickly go out of date, we’d also like to generalise with some series, authors, titles and publishers that we recommend.
Great AUTHORS
Marc Aronson
Don Brown
Marc Favreau
Candace Fleming
Russell Freedman
Yuval Noah Harari
Deborah Hopkinson
Tanya Lloyd Kyi (Canadian)
Randall Munroe
Jim Ottaviani
Elizabeth Partridge
Gillian Richardson
Steve Sheinkin
Cory Silverberg (Puberty)
Dashka Slater
Tanya Lee Stone
Pamela S. Turner
Great PUBLISHERS
Annick Press (Canada)
DK (Eyewitness; Big Ideas; Children’s Timelines; How Things Work; How Stuff Works)
First Second (MacMillan)
National Geographic for Kids
Usborne (UK)
Crabtree Publishing Company
Flying Eye Books
Great SERIES
DK Eyewitness
DK Big Ideas
DK Children’s Timelines
DK How Things Work / How Stuff Works
From Playground to Pitch
HowToons
Hazardous Tales (Nathan Hale)
Little Histories
World Citizen Comics
UN sustainable development goals
Great TITLES
There’s been a recent shift toward publishing a Young Adult version of popular nonfiction titles either simultaneously or shortly after the Adult version. These can be found by searching for “Young Readers” or “Young Reader’s edition” / “Young Reader’s Adaptation”.
Last but not least, pairing a nonfiction book with a novel can enhance both texts.
I initially started putting a fiction book on this libguide followed by suggestions of nonfiction, https://asdubai.libguides.com/ms/reading/nonfiction. I’ve now moved away from that somewhat and have started curating “Read Around the Curriculum” posters where either a curriculum topic is highlighted with fiction and nonfiction, or an “If you like / want to know more” poster is made of one of our book club fiction books with suggestions for finding out more about the context with other fiction/nonfiction books on the topic.
Katie Day and I would love to hear your suggestions for more nonfiction books, and perhaps we can expand the list to High School. Many of the books suggested in our list are suitable for High School and upper elementary as well.
Comments and suggestions much appreciated.
NOTE: Since the publication of this post we have been approached by commercial entities about using the list. While we cannot prevent the list from being used commercially this is our wish:
This list was created in order to freely help librarians all around the world. It was a labour of love which took a lot of our personal vacation time to create. If you are part of a commercial organization and you will be using the list commercially we would request that you attribute us and make a suitable donation in our names to “Biblioteca di Lampedusa” which serves refugees from around the world in their Silent Book initiative, https://www.facebook.com/BiblioLampedusa/ or the “IBBY Children in Crisis Fund”: https://www.ibby.org/awards-activities/ibby-children-in-crisis-fund. Thanks. Nadine & Katie
Yet again an article despairing how kids are not reading “For Too Many Kids, Books Are Uncool and Unread” with all sorts of “reasons” and little in the way of solutions. So here are a few people / places / organisations who are trying to do something and a little on the work I was doing recently.
Engage everyone
While language arts / language and literature teachers and particularly librarians are often called upon or take it upon themselves to play a role in turning out literate students who hopefully also enjoy reading – it is a mistake to pigeonhole the efforts onto a few people. Just like I spend quite a few hours of my week engaged in coaching students in sport I like to think that my colleagues in other subject areas – including Physical Education etc. could spend a bit of time encouraging students to read. Particularly PHE teachers – since as my now young adult son (previously reluctant reader middle school son) told me “give up mom, middle schoolers don’t listen to anyone except maybe their PHE teachers and sports coaches”.
Last year I started having a core collection (an idea initially started in the UK by CLPE, and carried on internationally by Katie Day) of 25 books per grade for our middle school. We invested in at least 3 copies of most of the books and the books were promoted in the ELA (English Language Arts) classes and the library. Having a narrower selection of books to focus on meant that as a group we could try and read as many of these as possible and “sell” them to students. The news crew of our “Falcon Flyer” also helped with promotion by featuring the books, and they were also displayed on our internal TV screens in the library and MS corridor. A weekly quiz via google forms and the “Battle of Core” assembly were less successful than I’d have liked – but let’s say it was something to build on. However when I analysed the circulations from these 75 books I was positively surprised and just how many had circulated. As can be seen – kids still prefer print, and audio is their least preferred medium.
In my discussion with the ELA department about declining reading there was a strong feeling that promoting the books shouldn’t just be on them – and I took that thought to heart and just before the summer in our last staff meeting with the support of our admin launched the “staff summer reading challenge”
This involved quite a bit of preparation work, starting about 6 weeks before the end of term, including updating the lists for the new year, taking out books that weren’t popular or didn’t resonate with students, getting suggestions from our most avid readers (and asking them to pre-read where I wasn’t sure which book would be better) and making sure we had coverage of genres, levels of difficulty and format (verse novel, graphic novel, nonfiction, memoir, fiction) and our books were reflective of our community – each grade having at least one book with a muslim perspective as we’re in the UAE. Our new list can be found on our reading libguide. Next up was making sure all the books were ordered so that they were available before the meeting and then making new posters, shelf-signs with a summary, badges and a “mini-book”.
The shelf talker signs were based on inspiration from Kelsey Bogan but I wanted them to convey a little more information that I thought would be relevant in the “selling” process – first to our staff and then to our students, so I amended them a bit – the colouring corresponds to the grade, I added the book image and the genre image. Kept the blurb to 20-25 words (combination of publisher blurbs, Magic School AI summary powers and my knowledge of the book – AI can really get things badly wrong with what trigger words would encourage readers and be very repetitive with some phrasing!); I also added whether we had the eBook or Audiobook and the duration of the audio; pages of the book; whether it was part of a series, and the pacing.
Here are the canva files for our Grade 6; Grade 7 and Grade 8 lists – feel free to use or adjust as necessary.
The badges were made thanks to the loan of a badge maker by our design department and the “mini books” are images of the books on a piece of foam that the teachers can stick on their classroom door.
For the meeting, I put all the books on display with their paraphernalia, and the teachers were invited to select a book to borrow for the summer, commit to reading it and to help be the books “key account manager” for the coming year and promote it to students in the coming year. Our communications department helped by taking pictures of teachers with their chosen books (hiding the face) so we can use that for a little promotion guessing game in the new year); teachers borrowed the book and could put the badge on their lanyards. They “claimed” the book by putting a sticky note with their name on the poster. In the end, only 6 out of 52 staff members declined. Several teachers selected more than one book and our drama teacher selected 5 (and sent me a very enthusiastic voice mail last week to say she’d read them all and enjoyed them so much she’d also read all of the rest of the books in the various series, coming to a total of 17 books!).
So, watch this space and we’ll see if this has more of an impact in the coming year.
Other people / organisations making a big difference
Although not always realistic, I am a secret admirer of the “go big or go bust” approach to things. I suspect some times we are actually underestimating the abilities of our students by setting very low goals for them. There is a balance however between something being too daunting versus to infantile. Generally I suggest students should try and read a book a week – something quite manageable if one is truly spending 20-30 minutes a day in focused reading, perhaps combined with audiobooks and some manga / graphic novels. Also, our top readers (ironically – or not – none of whom have mobile phones) manage 2-3x that.
The Neev Reading challenge 2024 of 30 books over 3 months for grades 4-6 combined with author interactions, and a live quiz during the literature festival is a great example of setting a stretch goal, having competitive and noncompetitive tracks and a great starting point to select books. I just love how ideas grow and evolve. When I moved to Beijing in 2018, I was part of the 50 books Reader’s Challenge which I think the librarians at ISB started. In my role of juror for the Neev Children’s Book award, I was chatting to Neev about the challenge, and what worked and didn’t work quite as well – and they grabbed the ball, ran with it and now it’s this amazing thing!
I’ve blogged about the Global ReadAloud before, and still think this is a phenomenal way to involve students and teachers with books and connections with other readers and most importantly the “smelling salts” of reading aloud to them. Here are the selections for 2024. I particularly love “As long as the lemon trees grow” a book that’s on our core list and a fantastic read for older students.
At the end of the school year we have 6 library sessions involving our “upcoming” grade 5 into 6 students to introduce them to the Secondary School library. This year as an exit ticket I asked them to write down their favourite book / author / series. As I roamed around talking to them while they were doing this, I’d say that at least 75% of the books they said they loved the most were books that had been read to them by a teacher, parent, grandparent etc. Reading aloud matter.
Besides her work on the GRA – Pernille Ripp also has some great posters (and books) on encouraging a reading culture, such as the one on “Helping Home adults support adolescent readers”
That’s all I have time for today – if you’d like to have your initiative featured, please let me know!
One of my book related highlights this year was being able to attend the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in April 2024. It’s been on my radar for years and the fact it took place during our school vacation and I could join a bunch of fellow librarians who were similarly disposed made it less of a “thing” to attend. For I am not fond of very large crowds in overwhelmingly big exhibition spaces (thank heavens for the Latvians who are proud to be introverts and celebrated that in their stand!) . Below are a few of my thoughts on the event.
The place of librarians
I’m not sure how to say this politely, but, like any other system, the publishing world for children is its very own special little ecosystem – this being the European version – I guess a kind of sub-species of the dominant USA version, where of course all the neighbours and relatives were free to join. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy where-ever books and reading are celebrated, but I was quite fiercely put in my place during one of the sessions “PISA IN BOLOGNA. HOW TO FIGHT LOW READING SKILLS”. After the session – not during (I would not have dared) I asked the moderator Daan Beeke, Network Manager EURead, Stichting Lezen, how it could be that libraries and librarians were not mentioned once during the whole panel session and I was rebuked for thinking that this event was for anyone but publishers and marketers for the sales of books. Bam. And there I was thinking that us librarians were at the forefront of encouraging reading and fighting low reading skills. Or maybe could it be that there is a correlation between low reading skills and lack of support and funding for public and school libraries? Just maybe?
The place of the environment
I was extremely happy to see that “the environment” was featured prominently both in the exhibition spaces and on the event programme.
The events: “READING FOR A HEALTHY PLANET: INSPIRING CHILDREN’S BOOKS TO HELP ACHIEVE A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE” organised by the United Nations, and “UTILIZING STORYTELLING IN PRODUCT, MEDIA, PUBLISHING AND CONTENT TO CATALYSE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE” moderated by Helena Mansell-Stopher of Products of Change, and “SEA OF STORIES”
For 2024 the Special Category for the “BolognaRagazzi Award” was THE SEA. WINNER: Gianumberto Accinelli, Giulia Zaffaroni, Giù nel blu – Dalla superficie agli abissi: viaggio sottomarino sfogliabile. Nomos Edizioni, Italy, 2021 SPECIAL MENTIONS Antoine Guilloppé, Pleine Mer. Gautier-Languereau, France, 2018 Masakatsu Shimoda, 死んだかいぞく (The Dead Pirate). Poplar Publishing, Japan, 2020
One thing that super saddened me was that the whole event didn’t have the environment at the forefront as plastic bottles abounded and I didn’t notice any water fountains or water filling facilities – we brought our own bottles and of course the tap water from the bathrooms is 100% fine, but it would have been wonderful to see the events – in particular the ones on sustainability featuring reusable rather than plastic bottles.
The fair had two events around this topic: “ORIGINS: INDIGENOUS VOICES IN CHILDREN’S BOOKS” Moderator Dolores Prades, Founder, Director and editor, Istituto Emília, Brazil Panel Nat Cardozo, author and illustrator, Uruguay; Adolfo Córdova, author, Mexico; Jason Low, publisher and Co-owner, Lee & Low Books, USA; Aviaq Johnston, Inuk author, Canada; Victor D.O. Santos, linguist and children’s books author, Brazil/USA; David Unger, author and translator, Guatemala/USA; Eboni Waitere, Director, Huia Publishers, New Zealand.
The representative of The Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) of Australia who won the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA) and is the 2024 ALMA Laureate, is a late inclusion on the panel and her discussion at 45.06 of the video below about the work they do, is worth listening to.
and “THE MOST PRECIOUS THING: VICTOR D.O. SANTOS IN CONVERSATION WITH VERA GHENO” – I wish the English publishers had retained “the most precious thing” as a title instead of “what makes us human” – just a personal quibble.
The place of dissent
Following the issues around the 2023 LiBeraturpreis which was to be awarded to Adania Shibli, at the Frankfurt book fair last year, I was interested to see how and if dissent and awareness of geo-political issues would be handled in Bologna. There appeared to be a guerilla type of image bombing in the illustrator walls, some of which seemed to appear and disappear. Both Isreal and Palestine had representation.
It saddens me that while children are expected to live and die through wars, they have very little representation and “place” in children’s literature – yet – and what there is still focuses very heavily on the second world war experiences.
I find this type of header in the NYTimes to be quite disturbing “Teaching Young Children About War Without Frightening Them – Four new picture books tackle the subject in sensitive, reassuring ways.” I literally have no words about how insensitive that heading is.
I’ll write a whole separate blog on this some time – in the meantime please have a look at the lists created by Dr. Myra Bacsal on her Gathering Books Blog.
Given my own geo-location at the moment, I was interested to see that IBBY France has created a list of 100 books for young people in Arabic – here’s the link for the English version.
The place for silence
There is a special place in my heart and every library I’ve had the pleasure of working in for “wordless” or “silent” books, and the fair didn’t disappoint in that regard. Of course the highlight is the Silent Book Contest – Gianni De Conno Award and the exhibitions of the artwork around the award, as well as the previous years award winners. These are just the best books to have in your library for accessibility, thought provoking conversations and writing prompts.
The best compliment I’ve received in the last two years was from one of my (non reading) grade 8 books who said to me during an athletics event, “you know miss – I used to think you’re just the librarian, but now I know you’re so much more”. The history behind that is that after many years of being a middle of the pack longer distance runner (i.e after each event I was pretty much very much in the middle for my age group and distance), our athletics director at WAB was looking for some more coaching volunteers and I did some online certifications in track & field and cross country and joined the after/before school coaches as an extra warm body in Beijing. Here in Dubai I’ve mainly done track and in contrast with my teams in Beijing who were primarily the more academic types, I’m finding myself amongst some great kids who are very athletic but have an aversion to reading. Have I performed any miracles in making them readers? Well no, I don’t really think so. But I’d like to think I’ve gained some credibility and relationships that can open up conversations around what they could be reading. And it’s helped me in creating a new blended section in the library – our sports section.
New genre – sports
It started with noticing a lot of students were asking for books about “basketball” or “soccer” during our library classes, so initially a new genre of “sports” books was created split out of our realistic fiction section. That helped some during the first year in the new library. Then students were asking for more biographies of their favourite sports people and more books (nonfiction) on their favourite sports. Our nonfiction section in that regard needed some boosting, so we bought more books.
A new blended section – Sports
Since nonfiction, memoirs and biographies were upstairs and fiction sports downstairs it seemed logical to move them all to one place. So we trialed putting all our sports books together in a dedicated area. That meant pulling fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, biography, graphic novels and manga and sorting them by sport. Our poster was made in Canva in our library colours and is 3 panels representing the sports of our three sports seasons (template link). Our book spines have a small sticker of the sport represented to help with shelving.
We’ve probably doubled the circulation of our nonfiction sports books and it’s an area that garners a lot of attention. Unfortunately it is still really hard to find good fiction with sports themes. There are more good biographies and a small uptick in graphic novels and manga. Here are some of our best circulating titles.
Fiction
As you can see it’s heavily dominated by Jason Reynolds and Kwame Alexander. How I wish there were more authors writing shorter easy to ready and/or verse novels without naff babyish covers for this demographic!
Ghost – Jason Reynolds
The crossover – Kwame Alexander
Booked – Kwame Alexander
World in between : based on a true refugee story – Kenan Trebinčević
Patina – Jason Reynolds
Rebound Kwame Alexander
Stanford Wong flunks big-time – Lisa Yee
Defending champ – Mike Lupica
Boy 21 – Matthew Quick
Sunny – Jason Reynolds
Memoirs & Biographies
In particular the series by Matt and Tom Oldfield (from the playground to the pitch) and any of the Luca Caioli books are popular. And if you’re wondering who the GOAT is according to our students – Neymar and/or Ronaldo books outrank all the others.
Nonfiction
Anything soccer seems to dominate with basketball and F1 making an appearance. I was pleased to see one of my personal favourites – “The boys in the boat” tying with “The Barcelona complex” for 10th place as I’ve been promoting it heavily this year – I’m hoping the release of the movie will help it along as well.
Stars of world soccer – Jökulsson Illugi
The official history of the FIFA World Cup – FIFA World Football Museum
Outcasts united : the story of a refugee soccer team that changed a town – Warren St. John
THE FOOTBALL BOOK : the leagues, the teams, the tactics, the laws – David Goldblatt
Return of the king : Lebron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the greatest comeback in NBA history – Brian Windhorst
The rise : Kobe Bryant and the pursuit of immortality – Mike Sielski
All thirteen : the incredible cave rescue of the Thai boys’ soccer team – Christina Soontornvat
F1 : the pinnacle : the pivotal events that made F1 the greatest motorsport series – Simon Arron
The race of the century : the battle to break the four-minute mile – Neal Bascomb
The Barcelona complex : Lionel Messi and the making–and unmaking–of the world’s greatest soccer club – Simon Kuper
The boys in the boat : the true story of an American team’s epic journey to win gold at the 1936 Olympics – Daniel James Brown (we have both the YA and the original version)
What are we missing?
All the books by Mike Lupica / John Feinstein / John Coy are unfortunately showing their age now and are also very much written for an American rather than international audience.
We’ve had some more interest in cricket recently and just haven’t found enough books – fiction or nonfiction to meet that need. While there are more graphic novels coming up we need more of them.
If you have any great suggestions I’d love to hear them.
Initially I thought of perhaps going through the DDC systematically from 000 to 999 and writing about some of the books I’ve loved / used / displayed, but then I spent the day yesterday re-reading Zen by Shabnam Minwalla and decided randomness, chaos and interest was infinitely preferable to order and sensibility.
There’s something amazing about books that manage to evoke a sense of time and place both through words and cultural references to music, poetry, quotes etc. And the books I’ve been reading and promoting for our middle school have been great at this. How many others sit with a book in one hand (or audio in one ear) and youtube open in the other to look up the songs you don’t know or listen to old favourites while reading?
I remember back when I first started out as an intern under KD at UWCSEA East making a libguide page (see “other interesting stuff” in the tabbed box) to support John Green’s amazing “The Fault in our Stars“. (cringe moment at how bad I was at that time in making good looking libguides!). When I introduce books with musical elements now to my students, I like to have some music playing in the background when they enter. Some more great ones include Ready player one, Red White and Whole, The thing about Jellyfish and Wink .
And here is a list of more from “Middle Grade Carousel” many of which ended up in one of the displays this year. Another display that worked really well for my “Swifties” was to match the song names in her latest album to other “related” titles (in the broadest sense of the word). There were chocolates on offer!
And that’s all for today. Please reply with your favourite fiction or nonfiction books on music!
PS
Two things I meant to put in and then forgot about:
uplifting music
According to a study conducted by cognitive neuroscientist Jacob Jolij of the University of Groningen, Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen is the most encouraging track in the world.
The research analyzed various factors, including the beats per minute, the key, and the chords of the song. Here are the top 10 songs that put you in a good mood (and the youtube versions):
Queen, “Don’t Stop Me Now”
ABBA, “Dancing Queen”
Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations”
Billy Joel, “Uptown Girl”
Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”
The Monkees, “I’m a Believer”
Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
Bon Jovi, “Livin’ on a Prayer”
Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive”
Katrina & the Waves, “Walking on Sunshine”
seismic music
Something that combines a bit of geoscience and music – according to seismologists at the British Geological Survey (BGS) earthquake activity was clocked during the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Edinburgh and the most seismic activity was caused by the song “… Ready for It?” .
As we move into Week 5 of online learning I had a yearning to return to my librarian roots. I was prompted by our librarian network sending out a notice for the voting for the annual Panda Book Awards. Despite the closures the voting will continue. In my previous incarnation as a PYP librarian in Singapore I found it a lot easier to promote the Red Dot Book awards – you have a weekly captured audience in primary, plus we had our after school reading club geared towards preparing for the annual Readers’ Cup.
Things change in Middle School – puberty seems to affect the reading muscle as much as it does every other aspect of being. Also in China we have the “Kids Read” competition for middle schoolers, which is considerably more daunting – 100 books in teams of four.
Another aspect of online learning is that it is really hard for everyone to stay motivated. Our daily entry point each day is the Mentor discussion forum on Moodle. As much as Moodle is extremely robust, it’s also very old fashioned and clunky, so driving traffic there is a chore.
I’d been seeing a lot on my twitter feed on US librarians setting up for “March Madness” and that inspired me to get a “Panda Madness” going for March. Besides the voting I also wanted to put in some challenges for points with a couple of aims:
getting students onto our online reading platform Sora
getting students reading online generally
getting students reading the Panda Books
getting students to promote books through FlipGrid and book reviews on Oliver
making the daily sign-in to their mentor groups a bit more motivating and of course
having some fun
First off was selecting the books – in MS we’re literally in the middle of the reading spectrum so I could select from both the “middle” and “older” reader lists. I selected 16 of the books, leaving out a couple of picture books and trying to use books that were available on Sora so they could still be read.
The complication in China is that not only do books have to be available with rights in China, they also have to be approved by an agency for use. So the hurdles we climb (besides expensive platform fees and expensive digital rights that disappear after 12/24/26 months or 26 checkouts are:
lack of a digital version,
georights, or
publisher preferences. For example, the publisher Hachette Livre (one of the “Big Five”), don’t sell their ebooks to schools or libraries outside of the US.
Then there’s weird stuff, like “Front Desk” is available as an audiobook but not an eBook … usually it’s the other way around, books are available as an eBook but not audiobook (which kind of makes sense as there are extra costs and efforts involved recording an audiobook). I’ve reached out to Kelly Yang and she’s looking into it (love authors who are invested in helping one out!)
In the Older list we’re missing “How to Bee” and “The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge” I’ve reached out on Twitter to both sets of authors but not heard anything back yet. In the Middle list we’re covered, although it would be nice to have “Front Desk” as an eBook – there’s a hierarchy of how students like to read
Not at all (lol)
Physical Copy
eBook
Audiobook
Next step was making the knockout lists. That was a tough one. Which books to pair against each other to make it a little bit exciting – I must admit to have spent way too much time on overthinking this one.
Then I didn’t want to start the voting straight away, so for Friday (we have virtual WEIRD every Friday where I lead the Mentor discussion) I started with the motivation and getting ready bit. In order to do that I needed to set up a point system*, Libguide, Flipgrid and Microsoft Team, plus all the graphics. Needless to say that consumed all of Thursday in-between the usual Tech troubleshooting.
And then it was a case of waiting with baited breath as to the response – luckily it was extremely positive – by the time I woke up at 6am European time, my “copilot” on the MSTeam had approved 83 students and by the end of the day we had 121 students and teachers signed up (over 1/3 of our student population).
Yesterday I wanted to sort out the leaderboard and the scoring … that was another full day task – mainly because there is so much to set up – a current and reliable student/mentor group spreadsheet (yes, we’ve had a few poor souls who joined the school just prior to, or during the closure period), getting all the data of who had signed up to Sora – with proof, and then the most time consuming – going through the library records of each of the 16 books to award points to the consistent readers who’ve been reading the books since the start of the school year in August! A very manual procedure.
Another thing one would expect would be easy but wasn’t is extracting a list of “members” from a MS team! There’s no way to export that – so I had to copy and past from the list into excel and then sort it out and match to my master sheet.
Another thing that I spent way too much time on of course was creating the graphic of the leaderboard. I must admit to having found one I quite liked and then adapting it. On the first day students had gained 872 points and we had a history of the books being read 129 times. A lot of students / groups tied as it was the first day.
Then rubrics / criteria for the Book Trailers and alternative book covers were created. Luckily I only had to adapt these from the ISLN Readers’ Cup that I was heavily involved in during my time there, and Barb Reid kindly sent me the latest versions.
The last thing was to create a Form for students to predict the winner and to post the updated status to the Moodle announcement for Monday.
Hopefully the rest will just be maintaining the scoresheet each week and monitoring the Flipgrid; student book reviews on Oliver; and entries for the book cover competition and book trailers… The first knockout vote will be on Friday.
Let’s see how this goes and if we can achieve our aims! Already the teams who have teachers involved (they can take part with their group) are the leading teams… says something! Happy to share everything created with other schools affected by the closure – just flip me an email or PM on twitter with your email. Everything is on Pages and can easily be adapted / changed for different books.
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*Points for now – I’ll add to this as we go on
5 points for taking part
5 points per Flipgrid promotion of a book (multiple promotions possible – but you must have read the book)
5 points for a one paragraph review of a Panda book on Oliver
2 points for every Panda book you borrowed before school closed
2 points for signing into Sora (upload a screenshot to Moodle to gain the point)
5 points for borrowing and reading a Panda eBook on Sora (screenshot and summary to gain the points)
5 points for borrowing and listening to a Panda AudioBook on Sora (screenshot and summary to gain the points)
10 points for predicting the winner
5 points for predicting one of the 1/2 finalists
2 points for predicting one of the 1/4 finalists
1 point for predicting one of the 1/8 finalists
5 points per good quality book trailer following criteria
5 points per good quality alternative book cover following criteria
Each week new random bonus points will be awarded based on new challenges
The complication in China is that not only do books have to be available with rights in China, they also have to be approved by an agency for use. So the hurdles we climb (besides expensive platform fees and expensive digital rights that disappear after 12/24/26 months or 26 checkouts are:
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 