More Novel Ideas
Centre for Youth Literature Professional Learning, Part 2
After Dr Pam Macintyre and Dr Susan La Marca spoke about books for Years 5 and 6, the Fiction Focus team sprang into action to let the 150 participants know about some new titles for Years 7 and 8 that would work well in the classroom as well as for wide reading. Some are so new that there are no Fiction Focus reviews yet, but we will link to our reviews in the Resource Bank when they are available.
We had prepared an extensive list to hand out, and we will put this up on the CMIS website as soon as we can make it happen.
It was a frenzied book promotion session - just like being back in the classroom really. Some of the new titles we spoke about were:
- Trust Me (compiled by Paul Collins, Ford Street Publishing) and Short (compiled by Lili Wilkinson, Black Dog Books) - two anthologies that offer a rich selection of writing styles and text types with myriad classroom uses. Both come with teachers’ notes.
- Verse novels, including Hugging the Rock, Susan Taylor Brown’s moving story about father-daughter relationships, mother loss and mental illness.
- Click, a great multi-author work that weaves a narrative from the contributions of many well-known writers, including David Almond, Roddy Doyle and Eoin Colfer.
- Graphic novels, such as Sophie Masson’s The Secret Army, which has so much to unravel including the 1936 Berlin Olympics, British Nazi sympathisers (the Mitford sisters spring to mind), Norse mythology and mystic mediaeval figures such as Nicholas Flamel.
- A brief look at dystopia with The Declaration and Fearless.
- Libby Gleeson’s new title, Mahtab’s Story, which would complement Parvana very nicely.
- Some historical novels, including the Newbery-award winning Good Masters! Sweet Ladies : Voices from a Medieval Village.
- New picture books including Colin Thompson’s ’shaggy lost dog with a lost leg’ tale, The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness.
The afternoon sessions saw Lili and Mike talk on Books for Years 9 and 10, and we forgot that it was late on a Friday afternoon as Maria Boyd talked so inspiringly about her classroom practice and using texts with boys, including her own first novel, Will.
Throughout the day, there was much talk about responding to texts, but that’s for another blog, another day.
