CMIS Evaluation Primary Focus

Run for your lives, me hearties. Or at the very least, shiver yer timbers.

Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The day, always 19 September, when even the most unlikely people start to talk strangely, with lots of arrrrrrrrs and curious head gestures.

What happened last year? Google has some ideas about how you can join in for 2009, including the never-fail pirate name generator.

And here’s a few (well, 76 actually) pirate stories to get you in the mood.

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos and used under Creative Commons licence.

Have you seen? Look to the right. There’ll be more soon.

For our blog post on the CBCA winners see our Fiction Focus blog.

If you hurry over to the UK’s Independent newspaper site, you can download free audio books for the next few days. Available so far is Polly Dunbar’s Penguin (a long-time favourite in our house); The Gruffalo (Julia Donaldson) and Cock-a-Doodle Doo Mr Sultana (Michael Morpurgo).

Two more to go, but we don’t know yet what they will be. So hurry.

Catching up on my professional reading, I came across a gem I think is worth sharing.  In the May 2009 (No.176) edition of Books for Keeps, Joanna Carey interviews 80-year-old Eric Carle.  On being asked how his years as a poster designer and then a graphic designer influenced his work with children’s books, he responds:

Enormously!  The rules that govern graphic design can easily apply to children’s books.  Each page in a child’s book is, in effect, a mini poster.  Advertising teaches you to convey complex ideas economically, but with maximum impact and children need pictures that they can read and understand immediately.  It’s all to do with composition.  It’s just a matter of moving things around until they are in the right place. (p.5)

These words, along with Carle’s May 19 blog post Some thoughts on LOOKING and SEEING, (not to be confused with a current TV advertisement!) may well stimulate students to produce some interesting art pieces or picture books.  Eric Carle and the United Kingdom’s new Children’s Laureate, Anthony Browne, are on the same page when it comes to the importance of “looking”.  Browne has made the encouragement of this a priority for his term as laureate:  What I believe we all need to do is to stop and really look at pictures and at the world.  By looking we learn so much. He has some interesting things to say about Creativity in Schools.

We last gave a plug for our State Library on 25 May when we blogged their new space for kids, The Place.

Well the up-coming holidays is the time for children to test run the facility by participating in the school holiday program, Boredom Busters.  Read the flyer for an overview of the program.

All from the Books : Children and Teenagers pages of the Guardian:

• Well, the first has to be about Lauren Child.  Here’s an interview with her. Can you believe Clarice Bean is 10?

… her name is not Lauren. “That is true,” she admits when I ask about it. Her real name is?

• The Gruffalo is being animated by the Wallace and Gromit people
• An assessment of the work of illustrator Bruce Ingman

For some great ideas for linking the two main learning contexts of children, for increasing mathematical confidence and for suggestions for some engaging parent involvement at school, check out Improving Primary Mathematics.  Don’t be put off by its unappealing black and white, dense text appearance: there are some really good ideas to be found even with a quick skim.  For example:

- Have children create a record book of Mathematical type activities in which they engage at home. Each record would consist of a photo and a detailed caption describing the maths involved.

- Invite parents into the classroom to share a Maths lesson with the children.  This will demonstrate to parents teaching strategies used today.

If you are a fan of the Frog and Toad stories, you will want to read, listen and see how Arnold Lobel’s daughter has created a new collection of ten stories about the amphibian friends.

The sixth UK Children’s Laureate has been named and it’s none other than Anthony Browne. The man who has brought us Willy the Wimp, unforgettable gorillas, Piggybook and surreal takes on fairytales will be an outstanding ambassador for books and reading. Lucky UK children. Here is some of the new Laureate’s work.

Despite the superb job he has done, previous Laureate Michael Rosen knows there is a long way to go. He reflects on the past two years – there are still plenty of brick walls to dismantle:

I am sitting in a room in the House of Commons with Ed Balls and Jim Knight. To my left are several people who haven’t been introduced, who are probably from “the department”. We are talking about books. I say to the ministers that they’ve put in place a compulsory programme to teach children how to read, but there is no policy on reading books. They look at me blankly… I say that what’s going on is discriminatory. Children who come from homes where books are being read get access to the kinds of abstract and complex ideas that you can only get hold of easily through exposure to extended prose. The rest are being fed worksheets.

Ed doesn’t believe me. He tells me that he visited a school where they had a library in the playground. I tell them that I’ve been making a film for BBC4 about a school that wanted me to help them become what I call a book-loving school. Their school library is a couple of alcoves of old books. They have no contact with the public library down the road. Only a handful of children in the school are reading books. Jim seems interested. “What do you want from us?” he says. “A directive asking every local authority and every school to devise its own policy on the reading of books. I’ve got a 20-point outline that you could send out as a guideline for people to adapt.” “Send it to me,” says Jim. “I have already,” I say. “Send it to me again,” he says, “and let’s meet up after the programme goes out.”