Get reading this summer!

School is (nearly) out and there’s no homework to be done: whatever are you going to do for two months? 😉 Here are a few bookish ideas to try…

Sign up for the Summer Stars programme in your local library!

It’s free and open to all children. Register to get your own Summer Stars Reading Card, choose from lots of exciting library books and get your card stamped for each book read. Fun rewards will be provided along the way. And at the end of the programme, the library throws a party! More info.

Meet the Book Doctors!

Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve injections or anything nasty. The Book Doctor is someone who can give you new book ideas if you’ve read all of the Wimpy Kid or all of Harry Potter or all of the Rainbow Magic books and are stuck for what to pick up next. There are lots of Books Clinics all over Ireland during the summer, find out where on the Children’s Books Ireland website.

Travel with books!

Are you going anywhere interesting this summer? Or do you wish to visit a faraway country? Why not look for a book written in that place? The website Outside In World lists all the kids’ books from around the world that have been translated into English. Just pick a country on the map and off you go! More info.

Read it before you see it!

Read the books that inspired these new feature films: Diary of a Wimpy Kid! Captain Underpants! Valerian! (You probably don’t know this last one: it’s a series of awesome French comics about time-travel and space, highly recommended!)

Write your own book!

Sure, why not? You can get inspiration from these great books!

A toast!

We had our last Baby Book Club last week and it was all about diggers. And trucks. And cranes. We read Susan Stegall's wonderful The Diggers Are Coming! and spent ages looking at the brilliant pictures of all the machines and vehicles needed to build new houses. We actually read the book twice!

We then drove our own cars for a while before PAINTING WITH THEM. That's right, we drove our wheels through paint and made some lovely works of art. The babies were interested to see how different cars made different patterns, but mostly they enjoyed doing something that's not allowed everyday!
To finish the year in style (9 sessions in total, which is brilliant for any book club!), we threw a party of tea and juice and glorious toast.

Thank you so much to all the babies and their grown-ups, it's been a brilliant year! To the big boys and girls who will be going to pre-school next year, we'll miss you, so do pop in and say hi if you can!
And before I forget, here are the links, as always.

For an action-packed day at ‘Digger School’, watch Here Comes A Digger

We Built this City, the Muppets version! 

Madness - Our House:

The Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang song! 

Drive My Car by the Beatles: 

Some characters!

For our final session of Writing Club with 5th and 6th class, we indulged in our love of monsters and gore.
After a game of picture exquisite corpse (that gave us the delightful Flumpkin among other creatures), we brainstormed about all the monsters we knew about before launching into some serious, detailed character building. Beware the banshee and the lightbulb-eating woman! Coming soon to a haunted house near you...

Well done to all and thanks again for the great stories and the great laughs!

A good yarn

The latest Baby Book Club session took place on a gloriously sunny and warm Friday, so of course we had to have it outdoors. Which was great because we were reading about Little Owl who lives with his mammy in a tree on the edge of the park and the babies immediately made the connection between the trees around us and the Owls' home: maybe (surely!) they lived just over there!
This time, they did most of the reading, using all their guessing and predicting skills to figure out what was going on in Tatyana Feeney's Little Owl's Orange Scarf and what might happen next. They all approved of Little Owl's choice of wool for his new scarf, although they all said it was 'blue' when all the grown-ups saw it green...

After a sneaky extra story under the sun (Feeney's Small Bunny's Blue Blanket), we all retreated inside for the day's craft. Using rectangles of leftover net curtain, some very hairy cotton yarn and A LOT of glue, the babies made their very own scarves!

As promised, some songs and videos about clothes and knitting!

Sandra Boynton’s One Shoe Blues

Bill Oddie, The Knitting Song

Sophie Madeleine – also The Knitting Song

Something to try with older kids: Finger knitted snakes by Red Ted

Words and pics

We had another brilliant session of Writing Club last week where we looked for inspiration in pictures taken from books and magazines. By asking questions of each image and making up the answers ourselves (and our answers were always right of course!), we managed to dig out the seeds of a story: adventures down holes that grew deeper and deeper; stories of gigantic fish terrorising whole cities; of killer flowers; family murders (murders feature a lot in our stories!); mad nurses; banshees; tornadoes; unnerving expeditions up Mount Everest and much more.

The writers indulged in their love of horror and managed to make the most innocent-looking illustration feel heavy with menace! blood! zombies! It's been brilliant seeing them tapping into their imagination (they all have heaps of it!) to completely transform the mood of a picture and make it 'reveal' a hidden story.
Well done, guys!

Of fairy tales, story plans and witch's knickers

Writing Club is back for a third and final sequence this year. 5th and 6th class are at the helm this time and they are full of stories to tell and write. They are also (many of them) full of a love for horror, crime and gore, which makes for some very interesting reads...
The first week we started with what we all knew quite well - fairy tales - and had a look at how we could use them to write our own stories.
First, we threw  a random word into the world of the fairy tale (say, an elephant in the story of Blue Beard or a pair of knickers in Hansel and Gretel), and reinvented the story with this new element. Each tale remained quite recognisable and yet very different.

The Forbidden room in Blue Beard's castle. Brrr...

We then went one step further. Looking at what other writers had done with Little Red Riding Hood, we realised that one change could be enough to transform the whole thing: change the place (set it in Inchicore!), the time (set it in the future!), the main character (make the hero bad and the villain good!) or the ending (they all lived unhappily ever after) and you will end up with a very different story. So we did just that, reinventing Cinderella in 1916 Dublin or Snow White as a murder mystery...

During Week 2, we had a look at structure: how stories work. And we noticed that stories often used the same elements (a hero, a villain, a helper, a revelation, a message, a battle, a victory, etc...) and yet they don't appear the same on the surface. Using 25 'action' cards ('Leaves', 'Decides', 'Test', 'Chase'...), each writer picked the events they wanted to feature in their story and went on to produce an original piece. Even though we used the same set of actions, all the stories were very different, involving horrible planets where you had to kill people by law, Justin Bieber, the Joker, an unlucky charm and much more.

Thanks to all who took part, it's been a hoot. See you next week!

The Babies have voted!

We had a brilliant session at Baby Book Club last week: it was all about the books! We read the lovely Snatchabook by Ellen and Thomas Docherty and that prompted us to have another look at all the books we have read together so far this year: The Tiny King, Dinosaur Roar, Goodnight Everyone, Every Bunny Dance, Penguin and A Bit Lost (click on the links to go to each session's dedicated blog post). Everyone seemed to have a favourite from the lot and it was great to see them rediscover stories and characters they had liked.

We then went on to make our very own books using scissors (we like to live dangerously at Baby Book Club), glue sticks and pictures from all our seven books. Each reader was encouraged to pick their favourite images or those from their favourite titles, and all went home with a bespoke best of good reads.

Incidentally, the babies were also doing something else: they were shadowing the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year Award. Every year, children of all ages get to read and rate the titles on the award shortlist. They are signed up through their school, their reading group, their crèche and so on. When the shortlist came out in March and I saw that Chris Haughton's Goodnight Everyone was on it, I knew I had to sign up the guys and girls at Baby Book Club. We had enjoyed Chris's A Bit Lost hugely and I thought it would be interesting to see what the babies made of this new book about a little bear who is not at all tired at bed time.
Getting the littlies to choose their favourite images to create their own book was a sneaky way of finding out how highly they 'ranked' Goodnight Everyone compared to the rest of the books. The answer was: quite high. After some complex and entirely scientific calculation (honest!), a mark out of 100 was produced and duly communicated to Children's Books Ireland. The SMGS Baby Book Club has therefore officially taken part in a national award! Not bad for babies, right?
The winners will be announced on Tuesday 23 May. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile and as always, here are the links to songs and videos you might enjoy after reading The Snatchabook or other books about books!

The Library Song, a fun kids’ song from New Zealand

Lil B Dub / The Rapping Bookworm, a thing of silliness!

Martians Discover a Book, classic Sesame Street madness

Bruno Mars Uptown Funk Parody: Unread Book (you’ll never look at your librarian in the same way!)

The Mount Desert Island High School version of Meghan Trainor's "All About The Bass/Books":