CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Book Week 2008 draws ever closer. CMIS will be interpreting the slogan ‘Fuel Your Mind’ by suggesting that we challenge students to read and respond to literature that might be unusual or a little out of their comfort zone.

The Book Week 2008 pages are still a work in progress, but we have made a start on the lists for Older Readers and the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books.

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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.

For the second time this month, the Fiction Focus team is heading off to Melbourne. It seems no time since we returned from All the Wild Wonders, the CBCA conference. On Friday we will be taking part in the Novel Ideas seminar organised by the wonderful Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria.

Our brief is to talk about some of the best new titles for Years 7 and 8. We will be sharing our ideas with about 150 teachers and teacher-librarians, and if that isn’t nerve-wracking enough, other speakers (each with their own topic, fortunately) include Morris Gleitzman, Maria Boyd and Dr Susan La Marca and Pam Macintyre of Viewpoint magazine. Mike Shuttleworth (CYL Program Coordinator) and Lili Wilkinson (manager of the inside a dog website) are also presenting.

We’re a bit worried that we are going to ‘do an Ishmael‘ and faint as soon as we stand up to speak. We’ll let you know how it goes.

All at the CBCA Conference last Sunday morning were transfixed by Neil Gaiman’s readings of his own poetry scattered throughout his keynote speech. Wonderful, dark and moody, the poems revisited fairytales and cast new light on familiar landscapes. Nothing can match Neil’s own telling, but Fiction Focus has received permission to link to the text of three of these poems that appear in the online Journal of the Mythic Arts, published by Endicott Studio.

So if you were there, reimagine the morning and Neil’s beautifully paced readings. If you weren’t there, you are bound to enjoy the poems in their own right.

• Locks
• Instructions
• Boys and Girls Together

Margaret Atwood and Jane Yolen are among the authors with poetry on the fairytale section of the site. Add some background reading of Jack Zipes’s Don’t Bet on the Prince or The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood and a challenging unit of work for senior students is begging to be written.

The Children’s Book Council of Australia biennial conference has just concluded in an autumnal Melbourne with the theme of All the Wild Wonders, the title of an Elizabeth Honey poem. The opportunity to network with colleagues always enriches the experience of any conference, so break times were also terrific catch-up times.

Three dominant themes seemed to emerge over the course of the three days:

• The importance of having a teacher-librarian in every school in Australia (and an exhortation for each delegate to lobby their member of Parliament over this issue).
• The literacy debate. Time and time again concerns were expressed about the obsession by governments with functional literacy at the expense of real literature. Jack Zipes passionately believes that we are ‘endumbing’ children and teaching them to misread i.e. read non-reflectively for quick absorption of information in order to pass tests.
• The trend in publishing towards sequel literature and multimedia spinoffs such as games and films coming at the expense of quality literature.

Highlights are always subjective, of course, but the standing ovation for Sonya Hartnett after she had opened the conference; Shaun Tan’s illuminating keynote; the enthusiasm of Wendy Cooling and the sheer niceness (not to mention talent) of Neil Gaiman were certainly some. Oh, and some of us learned a lot about manga from Queenie Chan, and we were all blown away by the surprise package that was Bernard Beckett.

And then there was the chance to get up close and personal with Australian and international authors, who patiently and cheerfully signed copies of their books, despite lengthy queues.

In two years, the CBCA moves to Queensland for its 10th national conference that references that Brisbane landmark - the aptly named Storey Bridge. Across the Story Bridge will be held between 29 April-2 May 2010. Make it a diary date claimer.