BfK


Jack Frost by Kazuno Kohara (Macmillan) Jeremiah Jellyfish Flies High by John Fardell (Andersen) The Talent Show by Jo Hodgkinson (Andersen)


The judges for the Booktrust Early Years Awards 2010 are chair Wendy Cooling MBE, presenter and broadcaster Kirsty Gallacher, author/ illustrator Michael Foreman, Booktrust Development Manager Janet Harrison and Modern Matron Jackie Woodroffe.


The winner for each category will be announced on 2 September.


The SLA School Librarian of the Year Honour List The librarians chosen for the Honour List are Sue Bastone – Licensed Victuallers’ School, Ascot; Rebecca Jones – Malvern St James, Worcestershire; Shiona Lawson – Rothesay Academy, Isle of Bute; Denise Reed – Hurst Prep School, Hurstpierpoint, Sussex; Kevin Sheehan – Offerton School, Stockport; and Duncan Wright – Stewart’s Melville College, Edinburgh. Their work will be celebrated at a ceremony held on International School Library Day, 4 October, when the SLA School Librarian of the Year 2010 will be announced.


The SLA School Librarian of the Year Award recognises the excellent work that is carried out in our school libraries. ‘It celebrates the essential work that school librarians are doing at a time when school libraries are being closed at an alarming rate,’ says Ginetta Doyle, Chair of the Selection committee and Chair of the School Library Association, adding, ‘We were impressed by the passion and dedication of the librarians we visited and the innovative and inspirational ways in which they bring books and an enthusiasm for learning into the heart of the school and into the lives of children.’


Hal’s Reading Diary


9-year-old Hal’s greater fluency at reading means that plots with tension and interest motivate him to read on. His father, psychodynamic counsellor Roger Mills, explains.


I


t has been quite a while since I did any reading with Hal. Several months probably. And when I sat down with him to have a go at his current book, Andrew Cope’s Spy Pups – Treasure Quest, I was immediately struck by some changes in his reading style.


First up Hal’s reading is now more fluent. Spy Pups isn’t super difficult (most sentences are short and the vocabulary isn’t too demanding), but it isn’t super easy either and Hal sailed through a chapter of 11 pages or so in about 15 minutes, at a speed that was new to me. Greater speed also meant greater motivation. In former days Hal’s reading would quite often grind to a halt. He’d come up against a word or phrase that he couldn’t grasp, would have to stop to try to puzzle it out, and any sense of dramatic tension in what we were reading would quickly evaporate. With it would go Hal’s interest in continuing.


This time however, Hal’s speed meant that he could maintain tension and interest. In the chapter we were looking at there was a bit where the Spy Pups, left at home in the cottage because they were too young to go for a walk, were investigating the hero Ollie’s room because he said he’d seen a ghost. Sniffing around in the room they discover some fresh, size ten footprints leading to the wardrobe which is locked. The pups make a kind of canine pyramid and the top pup turns the key to the locked door. This bit of the story happened at the end of a page and I watched with delight as Hal greedily turned the page to find out what was going to be revealed inside the wardrobe. With the old stop/start reading style this would never have happened.


Hal is better with words too. Vocab like ‘burrowing’, ‘ventured’, ‘suspiciously’, ‘providing’ all presented no problem. Others that he didn’t get straightaway like ‘duvet’ he got right immediately the next time they appeared, whereas in the past he would have been likely to get a new word wrong several times over until the penny dropped. In the chapter we read, only the word ‘chorused’ had him baffled completely, the ‘ch’ confusing him because of the pronunciation of ‘church’ and the word being totally unfamiliar.


briefing


The 2010 CLPE Poetry Award The shortlisted titles are:


Orange Silver Sausage by James Carter and Graham Denton (Walker) New and Collected Poems for Children by Carol Ann Duffy (Faber) Umpteen Pockets by Adrian Mitchell (Orchard) Michael Rosen’s A–Z: The Best Children’s Poetry from Agard to Zephaniah, edited by Michael Rosen (Puffin) The Magic Box by Kit Wright (Macmillan)


The winner will be announced on 30 September. Further information from www.clpe.co.uk


• Obituary • Basil Davidson 9 November 1914 – 9 July 2010


The radical journalist and historian, Basil Davidson, who worked tirelessly for campaigns for Africa’s liberation from colonialism and apartheid, has died at the age of 95. Amongst his many publications was Discovering Africa’s Past which was published in 1978. Written specifically for secondary school students, it was the first non- colonialist history of Africa aimed at a young audience and it won the alternative children’s book award, the ‘Other Award’.


Interestingly where Hal did make mistakes at times was over simpler, more familiar words. I’ve written before about how he can let his eye glide too quickly. What seems to happen is that the shape of a word makes him think of a similar but different word and he goes with that. An example of this was the sentence ‘Anyway, they could just take a look inside’, which he read as ‘they could just take a took inside’. Even here though he is much quicker at putting these things right, twigging that something isn’t making sense, tracking back to the wrong word and putting it right without any prompting from me.


All in all these changes make for a much more enjoyable reading experience for Hal. It was also much more enjoyable for me as I was hardly having to intervene and not having to cajole Hal into keeping going as I have had to do so often in the past. But will Hal’s new fluency translate into an appetite for reading to himself? Not at the moment I think. Hal may be better at it, but he still regards reading as work. Stories, which of course he loves, are easier acquired from the telly or mum and dad reading them to him. I sometimes wonder if we set up a complete embargo on TV and parental reading whether this might finally goad Hal into reading to himself. I doubt we’d have the willpower to see an idea like that through. But I’d be interested to know if any BfK readers have tried out such desperate measures. n


Spy Pups: Treasure Quest by Andrew Cope is published by Puffin (978 0 14 132603 0) at £4.99.


Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010 17


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