Children's Book Review, Sand Swimmers

Children's Book Review by Susan Stephenson, www.thebookchook.com

Sand Swimmers: The Secret Life of Australia's Dead Heart is a non-fiction children's picture book, written and illustrated by Narelle Oliver, and published by Walker Books Australia (re-published 2013 as a Walker Classic, first published 1999 Lothian.) I would suggest Sand Swimmers is best shared with/read by kids 7+.

The Dead Heart is a desert wilderness in the centre of Australia. It is difficult to imagine anything can exist in such a harsh place. But the Dead Heart has a secret. It holds amazing stories of adaptation and survival. Follow in the footsteps of early explorers like Charles Sturt and learn what the indigenous people of this land first discovered: not all is quite as it seems.

Like most Australians, I live on Australia's coast. I know a little about inland Australia, but my main impression has always been that it's a vast, inhospitable, lifeless place. That's pretty much what the early European explorers decided too. Luckily, I have Sand Swimmers to set me straight.

This is an elegant and fascinating book. The lino-cut and lino rubbing illustrations are superb and I love the way the individual prints "bleed" onto another page, or beyond the print boundaries. Oliver's use of a muted and limited palette contributes not only to the elegance, but also echoes the way harsh sun leeches colour from a landscape. The paradox between a common belief that Australia's heart is dead and the reality of adapted life forms is the "secret" kids will learn and appreciate.

Oliver uses descriptive language and imagery that pull us into the book and brings inland Australia to life for us:

"There are huge waves, not of water, but of fiery red sand. There are lakes of glittering salt and rivers of cracking clay."

This language contrasts with excerpts from Sturt's diary:

"Did man ever see such a place? A kind of dread came over me as I gazed upon it."

Sand Swimmers will fascinate young scientists. It's an excellent choice for school libraries -  a great example of an information text, and a source of lovely descriptive language for when classes need description models. I like the way it shows us Australia's dead heart from the contrasting perspectives of indigenous tribal groups and explorers like Sturt.

There are teacher notes available at the Walker Books website. Oliver's website has interesting background information on the book.

Find more Children's Book Reviews on The Book Chook by clicking Reviews in the right sidebar.

How to Subscribe to The Book Chook

How to Subscribe to The Book Chook

by Susan Stephenson, www.thebookchook.com

Lots of readers subscribe to The Book Chook via Google Reader. When it shuts down in about a week's time, you might want to consider subscribing to my blog via another RSS reader. If you want to export your RSS Feeds from Google Reader, Mashable has you covered. Sue Waters has an excellent post on Educators' Guide to RSS and Google Reader Replacements. Mashable has suggestions too.

Or you might prefer to subscribe to The Book Chook via email. It's simple and free. You'll get three blog posts per week most weeks of the year delivered to your inbox of choice by Feedburner. If that interests you, fill in your email in the top left sidebar and hit the subscribe button. (There are rumours that Feedburner will close too, but let's hope…)

I'll really miss Google Reader. Currently, I'm trying Bloglovin' as a way to read other blogs via RSS. Terrible name but good service. I like getting a daily email with updates to the blogs I follow. You can follow The Book Chook via Bloglovin' by clicking on the white cross on a blue circle in the left sidebar.

In case you're interested, here are some other places you can find me online.

Twitter: Twitter is one of my favourite social media sites. I try to tweet and re-tweet useful educational content, never my breakfast menu. I also use Twitter to tweet my own blog posts and find a lot of my traffic comes from Twitter. The restriction to only 140 characters for a tweet can be limiting but also makes it fast! You can follow me on Twitter by clicking the blue Twitter bird in the left sidebar. Here's my Twitter profile page. No, I don't automatically follow back, just if I find your content interesting.

Google+: I have only recently started using Google+ intensively. I like the community aspect of G+. I have been invited to join G+ communities full of interesting people and discovered useful content that way. Some of the communities I belong to: Great Books for Kids, Everyday Fun for Kids, Education. I like that I can group people whom I follow on G+ into circles and send content only to them. I also like the many conversations I've had on G+. There's no restriction to 140 characters. There are many features I want to try like Google Hangouts but I just haven't had time. I believe G+ is going to be HUGE. If you think you might like to follow me on Google+, here's my G+ page. You can recommend the content here at The Book Chook anytime by clicking on the G+ button under each post. I really appreciate this as it helps Google take me more seriously as a content provider.

Pinterest: I really like Pinterest. I do have to limit the amount of time I spend there, simply because I am such a visual person and it's fascinating. Pinterest has been a great way to find useful resources and also to curate my own special interests. Here's my main Pinterest page, a mixture of education (e.g. Resources for Music Ed) and personal (recipes). I also have several individual boards that might interest my readers: Children's Literacy, iPad apps for kids, Teaching Ideas, I use Pinterest to keep track of/promote my own articles (for example, here's a board that is just of apps I've reviewed) at The Book Chook, as well as anything else that takes my fancy and that I want to remember. I also belong to some group boards. You don't have to join Pinterest to look at it, but you do to have it keep a record of what you pin. Below you can see a snapshot of some of my Pinterest boards.

ScoopIt: Here's my main ScoopIt page which shows you my individual boards. There's some overlap with what I do via Pinterest. Both have a bookmarklet I find useful. Somehow my feeling is ScoopIt has more educators and Pinterest more parents, but that is a total guesstimate. I like that ScoopIt sends me an email with suggestions of Scoops that might interest me, put up by the people I follow.

Facebook: I don't really speak Facebook. I have a special page there for The Book Chook where I post my published articles from The Book Chook, plus other things I think my readers might like. Right now I have 1,121 Likes there and they tell me that is A Good Thing. My main Facebook page is a bit hit and miss - not personal, even though it's under my name, more educational. I also have a Facebook page that links to my writer website. Mostly I am on Facebook because I am told I need to be, not because I want to be cyber-connected all the time.

My website: My Susan Stephenson-the-writer website stores the free-to-download educational PDFs I make (e.g. Ideas for Children's Book Week), and is the home of the Fun with Learning Blog. It's new in 2013 but is slowly growing with useful content for parents, teachers and librarians.

Tribes: There are other small tribes I belong to, or hang around the edges of. One I love is the Australian Teacher Librarian Network, a sharing group of (mostly) TLs with a passion for information literacy and literature. If you're an Australian TL, this is a great group to learn from. Another is the Kidlitosphere, a huge group of wonderful people who blog about children's and YA literature. I also joined many Nings, and all were great, but there came a point in my online life when I had to cut down before I drowned in cyber stuff.

If you've read this far, congratulations! I hope some of that might be helpful, and that you'll continue to read The Book Chook in the way that suits you best.

Digital Literacy - Fake Websites

Digital Literacy - Fake Websites

by Susan Stephenson, www.thebookchook.com

Lots of us, kids included, tend to take websites on face value. If Google brings it to us, it must be true. Well, no. Googling is great for initial research, for assembling resources that can lead to deeper exploration. It can help with tips, ideas, images etc, but we can't rely on results found like this.

One way to demonstrate this to children is to share fake or hoax websites with them. Some are just for fun; others are incredibly realistic. Here are several to explore with your kids. By "kids", I would suggest 11+ years. As always, adult supervision is necessary. Kids learn so much by asking questions and discussing with us, another great reason to make hoax websites a shared experience.

* All About Explorers  This website was built by teachers specifically for the purpose of educating kids.

* Aluminium Foil Detector Beanie  I love the humour and detail in this website but it is probably best used with high-school aged kids.

* Help Save the Endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus  Same creative genius behind AFDB above. I mentioned it previously in my post, Fake Science.

* Victorian Era Robots 11 and 12 year-olds will enjoy the illustrations here.

* Moonbeam Enterprises  Great text to analyse. What is it really saying? What do they want you to do?

* The Museum of Hoaxes  This is the repository of all sorts of hoaxes that travel the internet. Not a hoax website per se, but nonetheless entertaining reading with potential for educational use.

* Snopes.com Snopes isn't a fake website either. But it's useful. When I receive emails forwarded to me from acquaintances warning me that cut flowers will suck the oxygen out of my air, or recommending I wear foil headgear to deflect mind control devices, I find the link to that urban myth on Snopes. I then reply to the email with that link and a polite request to be removed from whatever email folder I was in! Snopes is a great one to share with your kids, especially if they ever receive those sorts of emails.

When you do look at a hoax website, see what clues kids can pick up that suggest the site is not legitimate. At www.allaboutexplorers.com for instance, can students find any inaccuracies in the explorers' biographies? Was Columbus really born in Sydney, Australia? How can we check? What does our common sense tell us? What would have prevented the King and Queen of Spain ringing Columbus' toll-free number? Can kids find who wrote articles, or mention of legitimate organisations? Some websites look very professional and use official sounding terminology, a lot like the cleverer spam emails.

A great project for kids would be to create a hoax website themselves. This would make a fun classroom activity, with kids practising creative and critical thinking, persuasive writing, and having the chance to develop all sorts of visual and digital literacy skills. Children will enjoy playing the game of presenting non-facts in a realistic way. They can create their own images to add authenticity to the site, the way I did with my incredibly authentic giant caterpillar, above. I don't believe this will lead to a lifetime of deviant behaviour for them. Rather, just as I said in How Do Kids Not Write a Book Review, "Sometimes, by working out what NOT to do, we can shape our learning towards a more successful technique. Besides, let's have fun with a subject that can strike fear into our very souls!"

Not accepting things at face value is a useful attitude for kids to adopt. How do we know that fact is true? Can we find other sources to corroborate it? Are there primary or secondary or other reliable sources we can consult? Let's collaborate with our friends and discuss what we see, searching for truth where we can find it.

(If your kids need help in discriminating between fact and opinion, share Binky's Facts and Opinions with them.)

Thanks to TL, David Strempel, for reminding me that Alexa helps us discover background information on a site. One you put a url in, it will bring you a screen with a yellow button "Get Details". Check out some of the tabs there like Contact Info, Reviews etc. Look for red flags that make you suspect the site could be bogus. Gleanwhois.org teaches a framework to help investigate website authorship.

By making sure our children have some understanding of how to identify a fake website, and outdated, biased or fake information, we contribute to their digital literacy. Kids need to be digitally literate. It helps them stay safe online, find accurate information, analyse and evaluate what they see and read, and create their own media with digital tools. Just some of the skills that will equip them well for the future.

Image credits: (top) By Durova (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

(lower) Actual photo of the elusive Caterpillia giganticus, taken in bushland on NSW east coast.  (If you believe that, would you be interested in buying some dehydrated water?)

Children's Book Review, The Windy Farm

Children's Book Review by Susan Stephenson, www.thebookchook.com

The Windy Farm is a children's picture book, written by Doug MacLeod, illustrated by Craig Smith and published by Working Title Press (2013).

Why would anyone want to live on a farm where the winds are so fierce that even the pigs are blown away? Fortunately Mum is a clever inventor and can think of one very good reason.

A hilarious picture book with a very pertinent message about wind power and environmental sustainability, by one of Australia’s favourite picture book teams.

From the moment they spy The Windy Farm's cover - pigs with comical expressions being blown hither and thither by the relentless wind - kids will settle back, ready for a grin and a giggle. The Windy Farm will not disappoint them. MacLeod's spare text cleverly leaves room for Smith to interpret the details. There's tension too in the family's problems, and cleverness in the way Mum the inventor solves the problems.

As I said in my review of Heather Fell in the Water, MacLeod and Smith are a brilliant writer/illustrator partnership. Each has a great sense of humour, and that makes double the fun for young readers. I love that there's a strong thread of Aussie ingenuity in the book, and a real Australian flavour in elements like the fuel stove, Dad's Akubra and the corrugated iron dunny perched on the side of a very windy hill.

Despite the humour, there is an underlying theme about environmental sustainability that will stay with kids. I like too that there are plenty of points for discussion: Why did Grandpa never blow away? Should Uncle Jeff have lent his relatives money? Is being rich always a good thing? Would YOU like to be rich? Why does Grandpa say "Never mind", especially at the end of the book.

The Windy Farm in sturdy hardback makes a fun choice for home or for a library's environmental resources. There are excellent Teacher Notes by Janet McLean. I predict children will enjoy the book and want to re-read it often.

You might also like to check out my review of Sister Madge's Book of Nuns, another MacLeod/Smith book, or my review of MacLeod's My Extraordinary Life and Death. Find more children's book reviews via the Reviews button in The Book Chook blog's right sidebar.

Let's Celebrate Pop Goes the Weasel Day!

As you know, here at The Book Chook, I love opportunities to celebrate and weave literature, literacy and learning into special days. Pop Goes the Weasel Day is June 14 and I know you'll all want to be prepared, so here are some ideas.

First of all, what IS Pop Goes the Weasel? It's generally accepted to be a children's nursery rhyme, but its exact form and origins are not clear. The version I know goes:

Half a pound of tuppeny rice,
Half a pound of treacle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Every night when I go out
The monkey's on the table
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop! goes the weasel.

Here's another version of Pop Goes the Weasel sung on Youtube.



Nursery rhymes help young children develop a love for language, and a sense of the rhythm of words. Because we often bounce babies or rock them while we chant and sing nursery rhymes, I like to think the beat gets into their bones. Learning through play like this is such a loving, enjoyable and effective way to teach young kids, and gives them a great start on reading later on. As Mem Fox said here at The Book Chook recently in Why Reading Really is Magic, "…if kids know six nursery rhymes by the time they are four, they are more likely to be in the top reading group at school by age eight."

Pop Goes the Weasel Day would be an excellent opportunity to look at nursery rhymes you know with your kids. You might like to read books of nursery rhymes, sing them, and act them out. One drama activity I love is to have each group of kids choose a nursery rhyme and create a still picture that represents it for the rest of the class to guess. This makes a nice family game for kids and parents to do too. Make it harder after everyone gets the idea by establishing a no talking rule!

Nursery rhymes in general lend themselves to fun games. Toddlers in particular love nursery rhymes they can dance to or do actions with. Here's a simple activity pre-school and Kinder kids enjoy for Pop Goes the Weasel:

Half a pound of tuppeny rice (clap the beat on your legs)
Half a pound of treacle (clap the beat on your hands)
That's the way the money goes (clap the beat on your head)
Pop! goes the weasel. (spring into the air like a jack-in-the-box, waggling about)

(For videos of more great rhymes and songs you can use with babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers, check out Jbrary's Youtube channel. Jbrary is two wonderful children's librarians who share resources for story time, like this recent  Bears and Berries Preschool Storytime.)

Oranges and Lemons is a nice game to teach a group. Find out lots about it at Mama Lisa's World.

Here's a list of lots of Mother Goose Rhymes at Mama Lisa's World.

Kids are very forgiving. If you'd like to put some actions with a rhyme, but you're not quite sure how, stick to simple actions like clapping, jumping, bobbing and rocking. Or ask kids to come up with their own actions to suit a rhyme. Another "game" children love is to improvise a scene around a nursery rhyme. Consider fracturing a nursery rhyme too - have a twist like Miss Muffet chases the spider away or it wasn't a spider but a gorilla. Michael Rosen's book, Hairy Tales and Nursery Crimes, has some silly twists kids will love.

Jokes based on nursery rhymes are great fun for kids. Look out for books like Far Out, Brussel Sprout and Real Keen, Baked Bean by June Factor. These are compilations of children's playground rhymes and kids LOVE them!

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
Then Little Miss Muffet did say:
"Buzz off, Hairy Legs!"

Though definitely not politically correct or even nice, my Year 3 students always thought this one was hilarious:
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?"
"Up, stupid!"

And one more:
Mary had a little lamb, his fleece was black as soot,
And everywhere that lamb did go, his sooty foot he put.

Sometimes kids love puppets but are at a loss to know what to have the puppet say for an audience. This is yet another time nursery rhymes come into their own! Puppets make everything more fun. Even a simple cardboard cut-out mounted on a paddle pop stick can help children speak confidently in front of an audience. Knowing the nursery rhyme by heart means that tummy butterflies don't take hold.

Nursery rhymes are not just interesting for youngsters. Older kids could try predicting how a nursery rhyme came about then research theories about that. Because there are so many theories around, particularly with Pop Goes the Weasel, kids gain a gradual understanding that sometimes, there IS no correct answer or truth for us to discover. All we have are guesses and theories. Here's a video about the meaning behind Pop Goes the Weasel. This Youtube channel has many videos devoted to Nursery Rhyme history.

Nursery rhymes also make wonderful short texts for older kids, say first grade up, to interpret visually. Activities can be as simple as drawing a picture, through to creating a comic or even telling a digital story. Read about one way I did this in Visual Story Telling. I used Toon Doo to interpret the joke version of Miss Muffet, above.

You might also be interested in Let's Use Chants and Rhymes with Kids or the Free PDF, Fun with Fairy Tales.