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.

The oft-maligned Wikipedia has addressed many of its early problematic issues. Tighter controls mean that authorship and editing of entries are subject to scrutiny and sources are required to verify statements. Having students contribute to this collaborative tool is adding to the pool of knowledge, teaching them research and Web 2.0 skills and creating an authentic audience.

Why not get them to create / augment / correct entries about some of our Australian authors or illustrators? Patricia Wrightson, for example, may no longer be fashionable, but she will always be important. There are many gaps in her entry and at least one glaring error concerning The Nargun and the Stars, recently reissued by UQP Press. (We are tempted to correct it, but will leave it for a little longer so that someone can take up the challenge!)

Students will learn the importance of fact checking from print and online sources and citing them correctly in a real-world situation.

And if you are short of inspiration, check the YA Author and Illustrators pages on this blog. In the meantime, how nice if somebody could give Patricia Wrightson the entry she deserves.

There is more on using wikis in the classroom on our CMIS website.

Have you caught up with Inanimate Alice yet? It is digital storytelling at its most delicious. The fourth of ten episodes has recently come online.

Beginning with Alice as an eight year old living in remote regions of China with her parents, the story will develop in interactive complexity as Alice matures into her twenties. She has so far also been to Russia and Italy and in the fourth episode she is fourteen and living in an ordinary town in England. Why?

The related pedagogy project is attracting educators from around the world.

Each episode takes about half an hour to view. Treat yourself and your students soon.

Inanimate Alice has been created by Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at The Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montford University, Leicester in the UK.

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.

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.

Logo © CBCA. Used by CBCA Member

As well as being in outer space, intreprid hero Hal Spacejock has gone into cyberspace. To coincide with the launch of Book 4 in the series, Hal Spacejock : No Free Lunch, the eponymous title, published in 2005, is now freely available online from the Fremantle Press website.

Many Australian readers know and love Hal, the bumbling, none-too-bright but well-meaning space pilot, but Perth author Simon Haynes is hoping that by making him Internet-accessible, he will reach a far wider audience.

It’s a great opportunity for teachers to plan a lesson around humour in writing and in viewing. Comparison with zany television space shows, such as Red Dwarf, could lead to some fun in the classroom with scriptwriting or drama activities based on Hal’s adventures.

Other titles in the series are Hal Spacejock : Second Course (2006) and Hal Spacejock : Just Desserts (2007).

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!