Reading Fair Boards

After a great deal of creative energy, the Wednesday and Thursday book club groups have finished their Reading Fair boards. We have set them up on tables in Room 18 for viewing. They will be available for viewing at lunch time on Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Well done everyone. Each board is original and they all capture the essence of the book they are depicting.

Painting our reading boards at book club

Painting our boards in the sun

We took advantage of the gorgeous sunshine on Thursday to finish painting our Reading Fair boards. Next step is to glue on the literary elements that we have written about on Pic-Collage and to start decorating the boards. I always look forward to seeing the children's creative ideas coming to life.

Painting while the sun shines

The Y6 book club made the most of the sunshine last week to paint our Reading Fair display boards. Both the Wednesday and the Thursday group have been working on typing up their literary elements using pic-collage on iPads. After the holidays we will finish painting, complete the literary elements and print them out and then the children can work on making their designs eye-catching.

The winning book trailer

After tallying up the online votes and the children's votes, the overall winner of the 2017 Book Trailer Award is .... Star Wars, The Force Awakens! Congratulations boys. Your trailer had much energy and excitement. Well done to all of the year sixes - I am very pleased with the overall quality of the trailers you have produced and I have really enjoyed seeing your creativity at work.

Lego at lunch times

Here are some happy snaps from Lego in the library at lunch times. The rule is - "Play - then pack away". Sometimes it's easier to dismantle and pack away one's creation if we have a pic taken first :)

The Last Tuatara book trailer

Project Huia book trailer

Captain Underpants book trailer

Percy Jackson & the Lightening Thief book trailer

Star Wars - The Force Awakens trailer

Library as a maker-space: No-sew t-shirts

Thanks to "I love Titirangi" and Mark for visiting the school today to teach children how to make bags out of t-shirts, without having to sew. Hopefully, we will be able to fit in another workshop before the end of the term. What a wonderful, easy way to make shopping bags, so we can go plastic-free in Titirangi!

Famous Five: Five Go Adventuring Again book trailer

Donovan Bixley's author/illustrator visit

He arrived by taxi, after spending time at the Auckland Writer’s Festival where he presented his writing and illustrations to many eager visitors, exchanged ideas with Lauren Child and networked with other local and international authors. There was time for a quick chat and then Donovan proceeded with his schedule, visiting our middle and senior classes. 

We were treated to a visually fascinating presentation on a projector and we watched Donovan drawing on a flip chart. He weaved a fascinating story about his thought processes in creating characters through illustration, before writing about them in his stories. We met characters like Claude D’Bonair, Katerina Snookums and Sid Fishus from the Flying Furballs series, and Jimmy Grimholt from Monkey Boy (“part comic, part novel, all action”).  
Bixley has illustrated books with famous authors like Margaret Mahy (Dashing Dog), and Kyle Mewburn who visited us last year (The Dinosaur Rescue & Dragon Knight series) and many others. He has illustrated over 100 books and written 15. If you would like to read more about Donovan Bixley, there is a double-page spread in the latest Woman’s Weekly covering his story. In the afternoon we had an illustrating workshop for a small group of enthusiastic comic drawers which hopefully inspired them to bring expression to their characters through emotion and perspective.
 

We hope many children made connections between drawing, writing and sequencing. When the day was up, Bixley caught a taxi to the airport to fly home to Taupo, where he will begin working on the fourth Flying Furballs book. We are grateful to the NZ Book Council for partly sponsoring his visit and extremely thankful that Donovan Bixley visited us and shared his fascinating career with us, with such enthusiasm.

Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets book trailer

Under the mountain book trailer

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory book trailer

The Midnight Gang book trailer

George's Marvellous Medicine book trailer

Librarians of the term

Congratulations to our librarians of the term. The librarians all did an outstanding job in term one, so it was not easy to choose the librarians of the term, however the children pictured below went the extra mile and showed incredible dedication to both the fun jobs and the more mundane tasks. Well done to all of the term 1 librarians for a job well done. Many of you have said that you are keen to do another shift in term 3 or 4 - thank-you!

The term 2 librarian timetable will be put up on the library door today. 

Happy May - let's have a great term.

Nga Mihi

Kate

Lively lunchtimes in the library

Lunchtimes in the library are a blast!

Last week we had a little stormtrooper visit the library to request a pic with some of our other intergalactic characters... here he is with a bigger stormtrooper, and our very own R2D2 (who talks robot, but only on May the Fourth)...

I also had some very excited girls bring me their worm library diorama that they made using their own wonderful imaginations. It has an issue desk, tablets, books, tables, worm food, book worms, a light and even a little librarian. 

This year life as a library monitor is really diverse. Lunchtime library monitors are assigned to various stations (rotating weekly) - one or two will do the issuing and returning, one librarian is on Ipads, (they help children search for books on the library app and find them on the shelves), one monitor is on CD corner (they manage the queue of children wanting to listen to CD books, and handle the CD player), one is on Lego Club (Wednesdays and Thursdays) and one or two are on shelving and tidying, which sometimes involves putting up a feature-genre-of-the-term-shelf or helping with a display.

On Friday, we started a Create your own Fantastic Beast drawing and writing exercise. The library was buzzing. The children used their imaginations to create their own beasts, drawing ideas from J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and many other fantastic fictional creatures, and combining creatures from our incredible natural world. They drew incredible beasts and made up the creature's name, its habitat, diet, special powers, likes and dislikes, etc.

We will continue creating beasts until the end of term and then I will do a lucky draw for a winner to choose a book (from my special box).

Here are some pics of the fun we had.