Happy Christmas - traditional and modern

Happy Christmas everyone !

Christmas Hallelujah Chorus flashmob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

Christmas 2.0 - the digital story of the Nativity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZrf0PbAGSk

Book art - Hokey Stokes

A friend shared this blog with me - amazing, magical, book art with a surprise behind the covers / beyond the spine - created by artist and scientist Julia Field
http://hokeystokes.blogspot.com/

Here are a couple of beautiful book page wreaths for Christmas...
http://hokeystokes.blogspot.com/search/label/papercraft

Thanks Linda :)

Thinkfinity

Here is a website from the US Verizon Foundation with a wealth of resources for teachers, students and parents...
http://www.thinkfinity.org/

I've found some fun activities for children at home http://www.inventionatplay.org/playhouse_tinker.html

the Thinkfinity blog has a post about summer learning loss http://www.thinkfinity.org/thinkfinity-blog with links to activities http://www.thinkfinity.org/summer-fun-activities

and now I understand how microscopic creatures turned into oil ! http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/energy/interactive/index.php

From the website :
Verizon is a long-standing partner in national and global campaigns to improve literacy and educational attainment. The Verizon Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Verizon, invests in initiatives that leverage innovative technology and interactive learning to increase teacher effectiveness and advance student achievement. We are committed to enabling children and adults to acquire the complex set of skills that are required for success in the 21st century and empowering them to access, absorb, evaluate and use the infinite amount of information that broadband delivers

• Quick and easy access to the highest-quality teaching and learning materials
• Sharing resources and ideas in our online community
• At-home activities for students and parents
• Professional development training
  

Bookshelves of Doom blog

This lively and personal book blog Bookshelves of Doom http://bookshelvesofdoom.blogs.com/bookshelves_of_doom/
was highlighted in the National Library's Reading at the beach online community http://schools.natlib.govt.nz/reading-beach

Book trailers and teachers as readers

Lawrence High School Library, Lawrence Kansas website "Building a community of readers" has some good resources and ideas....
http://library.lhs.usd497.org/home.html

Here is a link to getting started with book trailers - "digital booktalks"
http://library.lhs.usd497.org/BookTrailers.html

And here is a link to Teachers' favourite books - photo, book list - highlighted in post on basketball... http://library.lhs.usd497.org/teacherpicks.htm#Jackhood

Celebrations, authors and Dewey

Here is a blog by a school librarian, Susan Rigsby, http://susangrigsby.wordpress.com/ who does a compilation post each month on the aspects being celebrated - special days, appeal weeks, and selected author / illustrator birthdays. It is US based and there are so many "celebrations" listed it is overwhelming, but it could be useful in a school library to pick some days to feature and highlight.

Thanks to this I've discovered that today is Dewey Decimal System Day (Melvil Dewey’s b’day, 1851). I think I've mentioned this great article from School Library Journal before but if you haven't read it, it will give you a whole new appreciation of the man !
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA148748.html

Instructions by Neil Gaiman

Instructions by Neil Gaiman was originally published as a poem in A wolf at the door and other retold fairytales (Simon and Schuster, 2001) but here is published in small picture book format, illustrated by Charles Vess (Bloomsbury, 2010) and it is a wonderful guide to what to do if you find yourself in a fairytale...



Here is a youtube book trailer for it - effective the way the colour saturates the illustrations - and it sounds like Neil Gaiman reading it himself...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWRvqO1MjIs

Here for a copy of the poem, http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofhs/cofinstr.html

and here is Neil Gaiman's website with plenty to explore about this prolific and varied author http://www.neilgaiman.com/

Mouse circus http://www.mousecircus.com/ is the official Neil Gaiman website for young readers, and here is the page about Instructions which ends with "Its message of the value of courage, wit, and adventurousness makes it a perfect gift for anyone embarking on a journey, especially graduates of any age."

Reading Instructions instantly transported me to my childhood reading of all the Andrew Lang fairytale retellings of Perrault and Grimm and others in The Olive Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book - with all the third sons setting off to find their fortune, old crones under trees repaying kindness with directions, impossible tasks and creatures with mysterious powers - wolves, toads, eagles along with witches, giants, goblins and ogres...
Andrew Lang was my great-aunt's godfather, and I have all the books from the early 1900s he inscribed for her at Christmas and birthdays, with their gold edged pages, embossed and decorated front covers, colour plate illustrations with tissue linings.

Here is a link to Neil Gaiman's advice for young writers... read a lot, live a lot, write a lot... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNb5NwxX_g&NR=1

Obsolete occupations

From NPR (National Public Radio) USA :

The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060
As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct. Click through the gallery to see examples of endangered professions, from milkman to telegrapher, and hear from people who once filled those oft-forgotten jobs.

Booklinks : historical photographs

Here is an interesting article from Booklinks about "bring[ing] the historical evolution of photography to life for your students through quality literature and Library of Congress primary source photographs." http://www.booklistonline.com/ProductInfo.aspx?pid=4566919

Classroom Connections: Photography as Art—Books as Hooks to Primary Sources. Petri, Gail (author). December 2010 (Book Links).

It includes links to information about Dorothea Lange's arresting photo Migrant Mother

Using resources such as Matapihi, Digital NZ and Te Ara, we can help our students access their New Zealand photographic heritage.

Dictionary of NZ Biography moving to Te Ara

From Jock Phillips, General Editor, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Ministry for Culture and Heritage

Kia ora
We are writing to let you know that the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography is moving from www.dnzb.govt.nz to its new home on Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. The biographies are now available at www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies.

We'll be officially launching on 8 December 2010 and are releasing new biographies about Edmund Hillary, David Lange, Bill Rowling, Robert Muldoon, Sonja Davies, Arthur Lydiard, Douglas Lilburn, Hone Tuwhare, Allen Curnow, Janet Frame and Peter Blake.

If you are linking to biographies at www.dnzb.govt.nz those links will be redirected to the new biographies from Monday 6 December 2010. To reassure you, we're putting in place redirect rules so your links to specific biographies get to the right place on the new site. If you notice any problems with the redirect rules please let us know (email matthew.oliver@mch.govt.nz).

Alternatively you can update the links by using the same alpha-numeric ID that you currently link to with the following prefix: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/

For example, a link to Michael Joseph Savage looks something like this: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/Find_Quick.asp?PersonEssay=4S9

The new link uses the ID of 4S9 and looks like this: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4S9

We hope you enjoy the new look biographies.
Kind regards, Jock Phillips, General Editor
Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Ministry for Culture and Heritage

www.mch.govt.nz - www.teara.govt.nz - www.nzhistory.net.nz