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Cambodian visitors to our school, Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
Next Tuesday two young Cambodian men, Chamroeun and Sovann, will be visiting our school for the day. Both are weekend employees at Open Book, one of our Cambodian Global Concerns, which has sponsored them to come to Singapore for a week of professional development, which includes visiting a few international school libraries.
They are available to speak to any classes about Cambodia in general, literacy and reading in Cambodia, and/or the history and politics of Cambodia, e.g., during the week Chamroeun works with the French organization Avocats sans Frontieres (Lawyers without Frontiers) on the Khmer Rouge trials, while Sovann is from Preah Vihar, where the fighting with Thailand is happening.
They will be based in the library and are willing to tell some Cambodian stories to those classes visiting for borrowing. They will also be spending time with Kalimah and Ernie, learning how we manage our book collection.
Open Book (Au Livre Ouvert in the original French –if you go to the page, just ask Google to translate the page for you), is the project of Catherine Cousins who runs an open library (Reading Room) for children on Street 240 in Phnom Penh. The charity also publishes children’s books in Khmer, French, and English (e.g., Frederick Lipp’s books) which our Grade 3 students are selling at the Family Breakfasts and other school events — and in the library.
Below is a photo of Margot in Open Book over Chinese New Year, picking up books for our Global Concerns projects.
Easy ways to suggest library resources
It’s that time of year when we are submitting orders for new books and resources for next year. There are several ways to do it.
The old-fashioned way would be to create a list of titles/authors and send it to me via email (kda@uwcsea.edu.sg).
You can also click here to use a Google Form to submit information to a Google Spreadsheet for me:
But if you want to give me more information, including an ISBN and book cover image, there are quite a few online tools that make it easy.
NB: you have to register first — at no cost — but then you are free to create all kinds of booklists.
The beauty of such tools is that you enter the minimal search terms needed to identify the book (key words from the title, the author’s name) and it looks for different editions for you to choose from.
Feel free to use any of them and send me the link.
- Book Depository
- Example of a wishlist labeled “ListA”
- If you use this tool and send me the link to your wishlist, it is VERY easy for me to then just transfer those books to an order form and with one click, they will be ordered. NB: Book Depository has free shipping worldwide (unlike Amazon).
- Amazon Wishlists
- Example of a wishlist called “future reading”
- WorldCat
- Example of a list of “global living” books
- Example of a list of “global living” books
- Google Books
- Example of a “bookshelf” list created on PYP professional dev. books
- LibraryThing
- Example of a library “collection” called “to order”
- Shelfari
- Example of a list — i.e., books tagged “absolute favorites”
- GoodReads
- Example of a “shelf” of middle-school fiction
- Follett Titlewave
- I need to request an account for you from Follett, which is an American educational book supplier who also produce the library catalog software we use (Destiny). If you do create lists in Titlewave, you can then “share” them with me, making it VERY easy for me to then submit an order.
- Sample booklist generated via Titlewave — professional development books
Want to search for titles/prices? Try these book sites…
- International (free shipping!)
- USA
- Amazon.com
- Follett Titlewave (ask me to set you up with an account)
- Follett Educational Services – for cheaper editions
- UK
- Amazon.co.uk
- Follett Titlewave ask me to set you up with an account)
- Canada
- Australia
For hard-to-find books – whether new or out-of-print
Singapore Suppliers
- Kinokuniya
- APD Books
- List of publishers they carry
Photo credit: 
by KJGarbutt
Book Week: March 14-18, 2011
Yes, the next-to-last week of term — March 14-18 – is Book Week.
I need a committee of teachers to help me generate ideas and activities for grades to use in planning their week.
If you’re interested, please drop me an email (kda@uwcsea.edu.sg). My goal will be to have a meeting within the week.
Here’s the page of ideas/activities from last year: Book Week Ideas
For you new teachers, what you need to know is:
- there is usually an overall theme to the week, e.g., last year’s was “Reading Opens Doors”. See these photos of how classrooms decorated their doors last year.
- There is usually a Book Character Dress-Up Day on the Friday — with a whole school assembly. (Tampines could easily do it on a different day.) See these photos from last year’s dress-up day.
- Each grade comes up with their own activities – you can all do different things – NB: there is no budget available apart from your regular budgets.
- In the past the library has worked with daily themes, e.g., Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day, Nonfiction Day, etc., which classes are welcome to join in with or not.
- Book Week coincides with the voting period for the Red Dot Book Awards (ballots close on Wed, March 16th) — which I will be heavily promoting (watch for more info)….
- Author visits are definitely possible. See this list of local authors & illustrators, many of whom are inexpensive and/or free (e.g., how much do you think Ben Morley will charge us?)
- Skype visits with authors are also possible. I have already arranged with Frederick Lipp for him to do Skype visits with us that week (watch for more info).
- eBooks / iPods / iPads — I will definitely be looking to incorporate digital texts as part of Book Week.
Kids keeping up with the news… online…
Want your students to explore news and non-fiction online?
For example, what do they know about Egypt, which has been in the news for the past week?
Try some online newspapers and magazines for kids.
We just subscribed to a new biweekly one called “Our Little Earth“.
Read the January 28th edition here. The lead story is about people rising against governments in Tunisia and Egypt.
CCBC – the BBC newsite for kids – also has a lead story on protests in Egypt.
For background information, try Qwiki. It’s a kid-friendly visual wikipedia that reads the information aloud.
Click here to see the basic Qwiki entry on Egypt.
Award-winning blogs by educators….
Have you been meaning to start reading more blogs about education? Might as well start with the best.
An easy way to follow blogs is to set up an RSS reader acount, e.g., a Google Reader one. (NB: although we have Google Apps in school, that educational package doesn’t have a Reader component — so you would need to create an outside (regular) Google account and then sign up for Google Reader).
Poetry resources
Grade 3 has just finished a poetry unit and both K2 and Grade 1 are about to start units on it.
So I’d like to share a Poetry Resources page I put together for all of you: Poetry Resources.
Poetry…. There are so many links I want to highlight for you.
— among our students, the most popular YouTube video is Michael Rosen performing his “No Breathing in Class” (though this is probably more Junior than Infant….)
— A3/A4 downloads – free – of poems to display — Poems For… a UK initiative –some bi-lingual – poems for … waiting, poems for … one world, poems for … all ages… (registration required before downloading) — but wonderful for display purposes….
— TextFlows — a program that displays a poem with stylistic pauses on your computer screen…. Here’s the list of all the poems available as Textflows – e.g., click here for Emily Dickinson’s I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Re poetry and teaching…..
A teacher shared this poem online — “Fetch” — about sending a dog off to retrieve a snowball which disappears upon impact — and he commented on it thus:
I was thinking about this poem at lunch time today. It reminded me of how we send students off on assignments and how important it is that we are clear about the requirements of the task, its purpose, and our expectations about quality.
It also reminded me of the times the administration here sends us out to fetch information or to complete a task without a clear definition of terms, process, or purpose.
I’ll end with a link to my favorite poem about teaching… by the Canadian poet, Tom Wayland: Did I miss anything?
Christmas holiday resources
Want some online Christmas fun? (e.g., Elf-Yourself videos, games for kids to play, etc.)
Here’s a Diigo list thanks to Colin Gallagher: Christmas-Related Online Fun
And I saw Louise (LPh) having great fun with the Portable North Pole website today. Go create a personalized video message from Santa for your loved ones.
For more literary humor, read James Thurber’s version of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” — in the manner of Ernest Hemingway.
We have a beautiful pop-up book of that poem by Clement Moore — “Twas the Night Before Christmas” — created by Robert Sabuda — available for teachers to borrow. (In fact, we have a good small collection of pop-up books for classes to explore. Ask Kalimah if you want to check them out….)
For more holiday books in the library, see the “Christmas” Resource List here. There’s a basket in front of Kalimah’s desk in the library for you to choose from.
Next week I’ll also bring in some Christmas picture books from my home collection — just for teachers to borrow on a one-period basis.
How about an environmental Santa tale? Try “When Santa Turned Green” (see accompanying website with green ideas)
Want a funny read-aloud?
Anne Fine (the former UK Children’s Laureate and author of such classics as “Madame Doubtfire”) delivers up a first-person account of an extended family Christmas that you’ll be glad you only have to laugh about from a distance — and not experience. “The More the Merrier” is very funny and very British.
In another first-person chapter book — “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” — by Barbara Park, an American author — the humor depends upon some children in the book knowing the plot of the nativity story, while others are completely ignorant. So not so great for a cultural group that isn’t familiar with the basics of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. But it has some of the best opening lines in children’s literature (in the Roald Dahl vein):
“The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse. The toolhouse burned right down to the ground, and I think that surprised the Herdmans. They set fire to things all the time, but that was the first time they managed to burn down a whole building.”
The picture book “Wombat Divine” by Mem Fox also gets its humor from some knowledge of the Biblical narrative of baby Jesus. If you want, I have a cheap plastic nativity set at home, which I could bring in, for kids to set up and play with.
As for picture books, my favorite has to be John Burningham’s “Harvey Slumfenburger’s Christmas Present”.
Friends Rock: Books, etc.
This Friday the primary school celebrates friendship throughout the day and after (with the Friends Rock social event).
Karl has collected some teaching resources together (see the PDFs in the Google Apps Shared Folder titled “Friends Rock”) as well as a list of online links (see the Diigo list: Friends Rock: Friendship Day).
The library also has plenty of books about friends (see the following Resource Lists).
Over 100 books are in the “Friendship” list, though there are obviously thousands that could qualify. If I’ve left your favorite book about friendship off it, please let me know.
Classic friendship pairs in children’s literature include:
- Frog & Toad — by Arnold Lobel
- George & Martha — by James Marshall
- Willy & Hugh — by Anthony Browne
More recent ones include:
- Cat & Fish — by Joan Grant
- Sheep & Goat – by Marleen Westera
- Pearl Barley & Charlie Parsley — by Aaron Blabey
- Little Beauty & the gorilla — in Anthony Browne’s “Little Beauty” (which is based on the real-life friendship told in the book “Koko’s Kitten” by Dr. Francine Patterson)
- Bink & Gollie — by Kate DiCamillo
- James & Eamon — in “A Couple of Boys have the Best Week Ever” — by Marla Frazee
- Dog & Bear — by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
- Cowboy & Octopus — by Jon Scieszka
One of our new books is a wordless exploration of the choices we can make every day in terms of friendship and inclusion.
Come into the AMK library and browse through the basket of picture books on friendship — find something to share with your class on Friday.
A similar basket will be delivered to Kathryn (KMc) in Tampines tomorrow morning.
Image of clasped hands: via Flickr: Esellee
United Nations Day – Resources
Thanks, DGo, for prompting me to update my own list of resources good for UN Day.
First of all, here are some Resource Lists of books in our library — and a selection of picture books (suitable for read-alouds) will be available this morning in a basket on Kalimah’s side-desk counter in AMK — and a similar basket will be given to Kathryn (KMc) in Tampines.
Second, here is a list of web links related to UN Day — collected via Diigo, the social bookmarking site. (All the links that Deb initially sent me are included, plus others.)
The links are roughly organized into the following sections: Videos, Things for kids to do, Children around the world, World stats/maps, and United Nations info.
Check out the World stats/maps section for videos showing the “If the world were a village….” — and if you want to see numbers flashing with up-to-the-second stats on population, births, deaths, etc., go to WorldOMeters.
November 11: Remembrance Day
Roxanne came in this morning and reminded me that today is Remembrance Day — the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — when World War I ended.
Here is a resource list of books in the library on World War I. Kalimah has pulled all the ones still available off the shelf and has them in a basket next to her desk. Please feel free to come in and borrow them for a period or two.
I particularly recommend the story of the famous poem (NB: Roxanne has this book out, but will share it if you ask:
Here’s a moving song and dance rendition of that poem (Grade 5, perfect for your current unit):
Comments from Katie 