CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The July/August 2008 Horn Book magazine has been published and some of the articles are already available online. The profiles of Newbery and  Caldecott awards winners Brian Selznick and Laura Amy Schlitz will interest Australian readers.

It’s an interesting award, the Phoenix. Its aim is to celebrate a title that missed out on a major prize when it was first published, but with the hindsight of twenty years is reconsidered.

The award is given by the US Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) and named after ‘the fabled bird that rose from its ashes with renewed life and beauty. Phoenix books also rise from the ashes of neglect and obscurity and once again touch the imaginations and enrich the lives of those who read them.’

In 1989, Francesca Lia Block published WeetzieBat. She has just been announced as the winner of the 2009 Phoenix Award for this overlooked title. In 2007, Margaret Mahy received the award for Memory (published 1987) and in 2008, Peter Dickinson for Eva (1988).

A list of some past winners and their acceptance speeches can be found on the Children’s Literature Association wiki. Others can be found on the Phoenix Papers section of the ChLA website, although this is a work in progress and not all links are working.

There’s been a bit of talk about Wordle on the lists lately, and we have also talked about using it in the classroom on our Technology Focus blog.

It’s an application that can be overdone, but used judiciously as an intriguing book promotion, it can be pretty effective. Here’s an example of the popular Stephenie Meyer title Twilight (not that it needs much promoting!) It was created very quickly just by copying the text of the review into the Wordle creator and tweaking the colours, layout and font.

This is best viewed by clicking on the image. Have fun.

Having just commented on Laurie Halse Anderson’s ALAN award yesterday, news has come through of a cool competiton she is running - and yes, Australians can enter.

In February, in the very early days of this blog, we ran a post on hooking kids into books and talked about book trailers (check out the tag cloud to access it). Now Laurie is running a book trailer competition for her book Speak or her newest title Twisted, which became available here on 1 June. Both titles deal with fairly meaty issues so are are best suited to mature readers.

Full details of the competition are on Laurie’s blog. Don’t be put off by the North American emphasis in the details - we’ve been in touch with Laurie and she’s be thrilled to receive entries from Australia or indeed anywhere else. Sounds like fun, so let your creative readers know. With school holidays just around the corner for most states, the timing is perfect.

Entries close on 31 August.

To visit Laurie’s website click here.

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.

The US-based weblog Chasing Ray is coordinating the annual Summer Blog Blast this week. Last year lots of our Australian YA authors participated in this blogging feast. The 2008 Blast stays a little closer to home with a list of UK and US writers taking part.

How does it work? A number of litblogs host an author for a day. For example, today (US time, remember) David Almond will log on to Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Susan Beth Pfeffer (always good value) will be at Interactive Reader. Tomorrow SBP hops onto the YA YA YAs .

Others taking part include Laurie Halse Anderson, Barry Lyga and Elizabeth Scott.

The full program for the week is here. And the beauty of blogs is that the posts and comments remain, so if there’s no time this week to check out what is being discussed, there’s always next week.

More than a dozen blogs, all passionate about discussing YA books and writers, are taking part in the Summer Blog Blast. These include Finding Wonderland, Fuse #8, shaken & stirred, Bookshelves of Doom, Writing and Ruminating, Bildungsroman, HipWriterMama, A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy and Miss Erin.

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.

Yesterday we posted details of two sites where students can engage with others about reading. Overnight, news has come through about the latest OzProjects initiative, Beware of Books, an online reading group. Teachers and teacher librarians can now do some cherry-picking in order to match their readers with a site that will really work for them.

Beware of Books is pitched at the 15-19 age group. Although it is possible to browse as a guest, why not register yourself and some students and actively participate in the project? Make a start by posting some reviews or reading recommendations and become a Beware of Books pioneer.

The OzProjects Middle Years Book Club, for students aged between 10 and 14, has been running for just over a month and already has a number of registered teams, including one from Singapore.

Have you checked out Penguin’s relatively new online community for teenage readers, Between the Lines? We alerted Fiction Focus subscribers to the site in the last issue of 2007, but in the end of year busy-ness it’s easy to overlook such things.

Launched last September, the site is targeting readers aged between 14 and 18, and there’s plenty for them to get their teeth into. Interaction is encouraged through blogs, author chats, book discussions and competitions.

Book of the Month for April is Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen, and being discussed on the blog is Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld who will be joining the discussion at the end of the month.

Australian author James Moloney has a new title coming out soon. We will be reviewing Kill the Possum in Fiction Focus of course, but he will be chatting online about the book on 24 April. Schools need to register in order to participate.

It’s early days for this site but it is rich with possibilities to get your students engaged in reading, as is the wonderful, and more established, Inside a Dog, from Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Literature. Both of these sites are on the Fiction Focus blog roll. It’s worth taking some time to explore them.

Judi, our regular Fiction Focus blogger has not been able to post recently. (Hurry up and get better Judi - we all miss you)

As guest blogger this week I’m going to share a website that was very popular with students at the school where I last taught.

Literature Map - the tourist map of literature

This simple to use website allows users to search for a favourite author and then suggests other writers who may appeal to the reader. The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them.

The CMIS website also has lots of useful information for teachers and students looking for something new to read. Check out the Focus on Fiction pages and the In the Classroom section of the website for links to:

• Author Studies
• Genre/Theme Studies
• Specific Titles & Series
• Teaching & Learning Strategies
• General Teacher Resources

The CMIS Resource Bank has a searchable database of over 5,000 fiction resources!