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":

International Children's Book Day 2017

I was in Meath recently for International Children's Book Day. ICBD is celebrated on or around April 2, which is the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen and it's the occasion to celebrate international children's books and stories. IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People) is the organisation behind it, and it crops up the world over at the initiative of the local branches of IBBY (IBBY Ireland in our case), libraries, schools or arts centres.
Thus I went off with the lovely plan to present a book published in English, relating the story of an Armenian folklore hero and written by a French author. It doesn't get much more international than Disaster David!
Now, as with all lovely plans, some adjustments (ie big improv) had to be made.
(1) I had to go to Meath twice that morning, courtesy of the bus strike: the first time I nearly went on the bus (there was no bus); the second time, I rushed home from Busarás and drove.
(2) the first group I met in Navan expected to hear about Mad Cap. As they hadn't had a chance to read the book yet, there was no disappointment, it just meant that the Q&A at the end was a bit disconnected from the rest of the session.

No matter, we had fun thinking giant thoughts and wondering how different the world would be if we woke up as huge versions of ourselves. The brainstorming was lively and surprising, and the kids' drawing skills proved most impressive.
I was delighted to restore one participant's faith in grown-ups when I turned out to be the first adult she had ever met who knew about manga.

Onwards and forwards, I took to the road again, to Trim this time, where Surprise Number (3) awaited me: 25 ladies from 5th Class instead of the 3rd Class we were expecting. I had a feeling a picturebook (even such a Magnificent and Sophisticated one as Disaster David) wasn't going to work for this audience, so I went into Mad Cap gear and we had a hoot of a session with plenty of shouting and imagining and drawing (kids can seriously draw in Meath!) and writing about super-heroes and equally-super-villains. The Q&A this time strayed into Book Doctor territory which was also great fun. (If you missed my book recommendations, I'm listing them again below, ladies).
So a great day all in all, and a great reassurance that, yes, I can improvise if needs must!
Plus, I got to meet a young song writer who's in with a chance to write the song for the Irish contestant in the Junior Eurovision. How cool is that?
Thanks to everyone for having me and looking after me!


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Book recommendations:
Who Let the Gods Out by Maz Evans: for fans of Greek mythology and running around the Underworld
The Thin Executioner by Darren Shan: a stand-alone novel with plenty of action and gore; his best book in my humble opinion
The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin: a sad-and-funny story for fans of Jacqueline Wilson

That's it, as far as I can remember!
For those who wanted to know more about Book Doctors and Book Clinics, it's over here: http://childrensbooksireland.ie/book-clinics/ and here for the upcoming dates: http://childrensbooksireland.ie/events/

Writing, rewriting, giants and babies

Chris Haughton's starry night in Goodnight Everyone gets the Baby Bookclub treatment

I've been busy with the Patron of Reading thing lately and it has been a hoot. The baby book club is proving a riot every time and it seems that everyone involved is really enjoying it: babas, toddlers and grown-ups. It is very rewarding to see people coming back and asking for more; even more rewarding to see the little ones rush over to the mats and wait excitedly for the story to begin. And what to say about the preschoolers who bring in their favourite books to show the rest of the group (unprompted) or the stories of terrible-twos who had no time for story-time and who now will grab their grown-up and demand a book be read to them? All of these milestones in the life of a young reader I am totally claiming as a benefit of Baby Book Club. Totally and totally shamelessly. Ahem...

First Class are giants today

I've also been busy trying out new material on my very willing guinea pigs (sorry, kids): doing a poetry workshop with Second Class (of all things!) and, especially, bringing out Disaster David to various school visits.
He has proved a very likeable hero and we've had great fun reading about his antics and creating some new ones for him.
An interesting aspect of this for me has been rewriting the text for a younger audience (of infants classes). A simplified version, with a bit less poetic imagery but a stronger purpose. Which has me wondering why I didn't write it like this in the first place? Writing simply has always been an issue for me; that is one of the reasons I started writing in English, thinking I wouldn't be able to indulge in fancy language as much in a foreign tongue. It worked for Beckett, but I'm not sure it has for me! (The other reason for writing in English was to stop sneaking in heaps of internal rhyming as I do in French; this has been a lot more successful as I can't seem to rhyme in English.)

After-school writing club has been good fun too, with highs and lows, as in everything. It always amazes me how much talent there is going round and how different the creative sensibilities.

Taking our chances

More writing club madness over the last two weeks. We had great fun discovering the role of chance in creativity with games such as Chinese Whispers and Exquisite Corpse. We also looked at how constraints could force the creative juices to flow when each writer was given a random beginning to work from and an ending to work towards.

 And we also looked at how to use our everyday reality as material for an adventure or a mystery. For this, we drew maps of our surroundings (the school, the classroom, the table we were sitting at) which we then transformed by adding and changing elements on a sheet of tracing paper: exit the secretary's office, welcome to the unicorn stables! the dragon pens! the secret passages!
Well done all!