Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy - An Autocompleted Children's Book

One of my favourite American bloggers is Travis Jonker, the elementary school librarian who writes 100 Scope Notes.  He's done a few posts with autocompleted children's books, where he starts typing the beginning of each line of the book into Google, and lets autocomplete finish them off.  I thought it would be fun to do a NZ version of this, using Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy by Lynley Dodd.  The autocompleted parts are in bold.

Out of the shadows
and off to see the wizard
went for broke
from Russia with love

and Hercule Poirot
as big as an elephant

with hearts burning
from dusk till dawn.

Bottoms up
covered in itchy bites,
Hercule Poirot
as big as an elephant

and hairdressing
from Donald Trump.

Muffin break
like a bunch of lemmings,
Bottoms up
covered in itchy bites,
Hercule Poirot
as big as an elephant

and hairdressing
from Donald Trump.

Bitcoin
all skill no luck,
Muffin break
like a bunch of lemmings,
Bottoms up
covered in itchy bites,
Hercule Poirot
as big as an elephant

and hairdressing
from Donald Trump.

Schnitzel stir fry
with a very special person,
Bitcoin
all skill no luck,
Muffin break
like a bunch of lemmings,
Bottoms up
covered in itchy bites,
Hercule Poirot
as big as an elephant

and hairdressing
from Donald Trump.

With arms wide open
they see me rollin
past the point of no return
to the forest of firefly lights.
They snuck into America
and they swam right over the dam,
when suddenly,
out of the woods
they
saw...

SCARFACE RAPPER
the toughest tongue twister
in
Toyworld.

"EEEK!"
said Scarface Rapper.

Off with a stick
a waiter and a how to book,
a scatter of stardust
and a clatter of clogs,
went school closings,
with a very heavy heart,
Bitcoin
all skill no luck,
Muffin break
like a bunch of lemmings,
Bottoms up
covered in itchy bites,
Hercule Poirot
as big as an elephant

and hairdressing
from Donald Trump.

I really want to know what you could do with a stick, a waiter and a how to book!

Image: Lincoln Simms

When I checked these autocompletes on other devices they weren't always the same...interesting.

Thanks for the idea Travis, I had a lot of fun!

Four Things I'm Excited about in 2018: #4 Book Week

#1 Library Llamas
#2 Patron of Reading
#3 Reading Buddies
#4 Book Week

The fourth thing I'm excited about this year is our Book Week, which is in Week 3 next term.  I always enjoy a week of putting books and reading in the limelight, and I have lots of ideas to try.  Some of these are still evolving, but this is what I have so far:

Theme = Sharing Stories

When we held our Teachers' Reading Groups last year, I was disappointed by some of the results from surveys we did in the participants' classrooms, in particular the percentages of children who weren't being read to by their parents. I wanted a way to gently promote the importance of reading to our children, even when they are old enough to read to themselves.  So the theme for our Book Week this year is "Sharing Stories".

Picture Book World Cup

A while back I saw a post on Twitter about a Picture Book World Cup and I've been keen to try it ever since.  Author Jonathan Emmett describes it fully here, but basically it is a knockout competition where books are paired against each other and students vote on the ones they like the best.  Jonathan is a Patron of Reading and he ran a Picture Book World Cup at his patron school.  What got me hooked is his description of the special assembly to announce the winner - "Both books had enthusiastic supporters who broke out into excited cheering whenever their book pulled ahead".  Wouldn't that be fantastic?!  To have a school so excited about books they start cheering about them?

To make it manageable at our large school, we are going to run three Picture Book World Cups, one each for our Year 0-2, Year 3-4 and Year 5-6 classes.  This will also allow me to give the Year 5 & 6 students some sophisticated picture books. 

The Picture Book World Cup takes place over the course of a week, and will be one of the big events for our Book Week.

Readathon

Our PTA had tentatively proposed a Spellathon for next term, but happily they have agreed to change this to a Readathon.  I think this will fit nicely with our theme of Sharing Stories, as it will be a good way to encourage students and parents to read together at home.  I did a bit of research about how this works for the PTA, but it will be their job to run it.  The way that I liked best is to organise it by a minimum amount of reading per day.  After the student has met the minimum amount, any more reading that day does not count toward the sponsorship.  This encourages regular reading, not just one big session, and it also means that sponsors have an idea about what the maximum amount of their sponsorship will be.  

I have heard of students being sponsored by the amount of books they read, but I have concerns that doing it that way would incentivise reading smaller, easier books as fast as you can, rather than enjoying reading any story, however large or small, at whatever pace suits you.

Book Basketball Death Match

Earlier this month, I co-presented a workshop with the amazing teacher/librarian Steph Ellis.  She introduced me to the idea of Book Basketball Deathmatch.  Teams of five are given ten points each and in turns they have to answer book-related questions.  If they get the question right, one person from a team takes a shot at a basketball net.  If they sink the shot, they get to nominate a team to take points off.  Once a team has lost all of its points they are out of the game. 

Given our presentation was titled "Libraries Just Wanna Have Fun", we thought it would be a good excuse to test the game out on our unsuspecting audience.  It was a bit of a gamble with around 50 in our audience, but with a few adjustments (we overestimated our collective throwing abilities and need to bring our "net" in closer!), we could see that it was as much fun as we'd thought it might be.  We didn't finish a whole game, but there was still time for rivalries to form between Team 2 and Team 5!   All it took was one team choosing to deduct points from the other and the war was on!  It looked like having ten points each might make the game take quite a long time to play, I might try five points each for our school version.  We didn't have a basketball net, so our net was just an empty rubbish bin.

I'm wondering whether I should combine a staff version of Book Basketball Death Match with our next Teachers' Reading Group session.  It would be a lot of fun and they would get an idea of how to run it.  

I think we'll have to rename this for our younger audience, it will probably be Book Basketball Survivor. 

Author Visits

Dawn McMillan, our Patron of Reading, is coming on the Friday and will speak with our Year 3 & 4 students.  Illustrator Ross Kinnaird, who illustrates a lot of Dawn's books ,is also attending on the Friday and will be working with our Year 5 & 6 students.  Finally, we also have author Angie Belcher coming in earlier in the week to talk with our Year 1 & 2 students.  That might seem like a lot of authors/illustrators, but it is still 10-12 classes each for them.

Book Art

I'll be offering a couple of suggestions to the teachers for creating art for, or during, Book Week.  There is "door wars", where classes decorate their classroom doors using a book as inspiration.  Or students could draw their favourite book's cover and write a couple of sentences about why they like it.  Or instead of a couple of sentences they could give a three word review, (another idea that Steph Ellis talked about in our presentation).

Student Storytellers/Poets

When I was in London last year, I got to attend a workshop by author Atinuke (I love her Anna Hibiscus and No.1 Car Spotter books).  During the workshop, Atinuke told a traditional story.  There was no book, just her telling the story from memory.  I was completely enthralled and realised it had been a long, long time since I had heard a story in this way.  I was keen to have some of our older students tell stories to our younger students during Book Week.  Fortunately this ties in with our oral literacy curriculum, and one of our teachers is working on this with her students for me.

Then a couple of weeks ago I had a chance conversation with another teacher, who was telling me that her students were enjoying learning poetry and performing it.  Excellent, some more student entertainers for Book Week!  I love that this will be a different aspect of stories and poetry that we can share.

Mystery Readers

We've done Mystery Readers in the past and they were popular.  They suit the Sharing Stories theme perfectly so we'll be doing it again on the last two days of Book Week.  On the first day we'll have a staff swap (including senior management and support staff).  On the second day I hope that Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird will join in, as well as parents, who could share a favourite book from their childhood, and/or one from a different culture.

"The Big Read"

On our final day we will have "The Big Read".  I am hoping that we can encourage families to come in and celebrate reading with their children.  I am thinking that it would be nice if Dawn and Ross could take the opportunity to talk about encouraging reading for pleasure with parents in a special assembly.  I'll have to look into that.  We will have the announcements of the Picture Book World Cup winners, and student/parent sessions from Dawn and Ross.  Students will be able to come in their pyjamas, with their favourite soft toys.  I'll bring in lots of blankets and pillows and we can all lounge around in the library!  I'm not sure exactly how the morning will look for parents attending, I'm hoping to get some help with that from our teams.


I have been invited to attend a staff meeting in a couple of weeks to talk about Book Week and our plans for it.  The following day Dawn McMillan is coming for her first visit as Patron, and I'll go over our Book Week plans with her then.  The week after that I plan on attending a PTA meeting to help with the Readathon.  And then it's the holidays, and all of a sudden Term 2, Week 3 doesn't seem so far away!  Isn't that always the case?!

Four Things I'm Excited about in 2018: #3 Reading Buddies

#1 Library Llamas
#2 Patron of Reading
#3 Reading Buddies
#4 Book Week

In another project inspired by Jon Biddle (see my Patron of Reading post for the first), we are going to be trialling Reading Buddies in our school.  I saw Jon's blog post in December and thought it sounded like a nice way to help promote a love of reading in some of our students who could use extra encouragement.  The idea is that each student is assigned a staff member (not necessarily a teacher) who spends a bit of time each week talking with them about books and what they are reading.

I took this idea to our DP, who was supportive but mindful of the workload of our teachers.  We have decided to start small, with our priority learners teacher, myself, and two of the teachers from my Teachers' Reading Group.  We are currently waiting for the students to be selected, then we are ready to go.  To start with, we will be working with a few of our Year 5 & 6 students.  

I often help students select books to read, but don't often spend a sustained period of time with one particular student.  I'm looking forward to experiencing this different dynamic and seeing whether it can have an impact on a student's reading life.  I'm also hopeful that as a group we can discuss what books and techniques are working for our reading buddies and build on each other's knowledge.  With any luck the trial will be so successful we'll be able to entice other teachers to join in, but in the meantime I am just happy, and excited, that we get to give it a go.

Four Things I'm Excited about in 2018: #2 Patron of Reading

#1 Library Llamas

#2 Patron of Reading

#3 Reading Buddies

#4 Book Week

During my trip to England last year, I got to meet Jon Biddle, a teacher who helped set up the Patron of Reading scheme.  According to the website, a Patron of Reading is: 

a school's special author, poet, storyteller or illustrator.  The school and the patron develop a relationship over a period of time.  Everything the patron does is related to helping encourage and develop a reading for pleasure culture in the school:  book quizzes, blogs, book recommendations, discussions, plays, poetry bashes, blogs, book trailers and visits.  The possibilities are virtually endless.

 I love the idea of being able to form a deeper relationship with a Patron, and keeping in contact with them in between multiple school visits.  We've only ever had single visits from authors/illustrators in the past, which means, in most cases, one talk with accompanying slides to groups of anywhere from 60-300 children.  I'm not saying that these events aren't worthwhile, they are very inspirational to our students.  However, once I saw what could happen with a Patron of Reading I was very keen to give the idea a go.  Fortunately, I got the support of our DP, so this year our school has it's first Patron of Reading!

The first step was to choose a Patron.  We decided on an author to start with, and I suggested Dawn McMillan.  Dawn visited our school in 2014, and in addition to speaking with our younger students, also ran a writing workshop for our older budding authors.  I like the fact that Dawn has published a number of books, including many educational readers that our students will be familiar with.  But what appealed to me the most was the fact that she relates so well to the students (being an ex-teacher probably helps!) and she seems to be such a positive, enthusiastic person.  I emailed Dawn about the idea, with a link to the Patron of Reading website.  Within hours she had replied, saying that she would love to do it.

Photo courtesy of Dawn McMillan

Our first visit from Dawn is due to take place on 5 April.  We have a number of activities planned, with a focus on Dawn meeting our Year 5 & 6 students in this first visit.  With over 740 students at our school, we didn't want to spread Dawn too thin!  She has agreed to an interview with a few of our Library Llamas for their Youtube Channel, and I'll be taking the opportunity to sit down with her face-to-face and talk about ideas for future visits, including one in May which will be during our Book Week.  We have so many other things that we can do, Dawn herself has already provided me with a nice long list!  I'm so excited about seeing what we can achieve together.

Four Things I'm Excited about in 2018: #1 Library Llamas

#1 Library Llamas
#2 Patron of Reading
#3 Reading Buddies
#4 Book Week

I've been meaning to write about some of the exciting things I have planned for this year.  These are the projects, schemes, clubs and events that are a joy to organise and something I eagerly look forward to being a part of.  We all need a few of these in our working lives, and this year I have at least four that make me smile and put a spring in my step.  I'm going to share these over the next few days, and the first one I'm going to talk about is our Book Club and their Youtube channel.

At last year's SLANZA conference, Australian keynote speaker Adele Walsh introduced me to the world of Booktube, specifically polandbananasbooks.  It was a revelation - I never knew that world existed.  At the time, I wondered "can we do something similar with our kids?" but it wasn't until lamenting the unloved folder of our written book reviews that I decided to give it a try.  So this year, I have launched our booktubing Year 6 book club.  It's a big club, around 25, and that makes group decision-making a bit time consuming.  However, I believe that book clubs are a great place to encourage student agency and empowerment, two popular goals in the wider education community.

I set up a blog to help communicate with the club members (I shared the link with their parents via the Seesaw app).  As some of our members don't have parents signed up to Seesaw I won't be able to rely on it as my main form of communication, but it does help me keep all relevant information in one place.  In my first post, I shared the work of some younger booktubers for inspiration.

Our first decision was the name of the club - the Library Llamas!  This was decided on Tuesday, and apparently we also needed a song and a dance - who knew?!  That book club meeting has to have been the noisiest one in the history of all book club meetings - it was loud!  And the tune got stuck in my head, watch it at your own risk:

Some of our students chose not to be in the song and dance.  Some will be doing other, less performance-based videos, others are going to work behind the scenes and help plan the videos.

Coming up next week we will be looking at how to organise the production of more videos - book reviews, interviews, scenes from books etc.  I think we'll have to break into smaller groups, but we can do brainstorming sessions for ideas as a whole.  I already have an interview set up in April, with Dawn McMillan, our new Patron of Reading (read more about that tomorrow!).

I'm really excited about this project because it has so much potential and I'm not sure where it's going to take me.  The enthusiasm of the kids is infectious, even if I have to tell them that thinking about "merch" is a bit premature, and hitting 1,000,000 subscribers is a bit too big of a target!

My ultimate goal is to connect with other students within our school, our country and internationally, and share our love of books.  It would be great if we could have some book conversations with other students through the comments sections in our videos.

Watch this space and I'll document our journey.  And if you could subscribe to our channel, that would make our Library Llamas very happy :)

Oh, and on a side note, I've learned some very interesting information about llamas.  Did you know that they are considerably bigger than alpacas and have longer faces and banana-shaped ears?  (I didn't want to accidentally put a photo of an alpaca on our channel so I needed to research the difference!).