What’s happening in the library?

Everyone welcome every Morning Break! We used to reserve MTW for Grades 4 & 5 and TTh for Grades 2 & 3 in the library during Morning Break time. But now every year band is welcome every day.

Celebrate Earth Day! Grab a book from the Earth Day display in the Younger Readers section of the library. Standard classics such as “The Lorax” and “Where the Forest Meets the Sea” are there, as well as plenty of non-fiction about environmentalism and recycling.

“All wars, just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child.” (Quote by Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children foundation). In light of the Grade 5 unit of inquiry into War Through the Eyes of a Child, the display bookcase next to the check-out desk is now full of books, including picture books, novels, and non-fiction, related to war and conflict.

See, in particular, the wordless picture book “Why?” by Nikolai Popov. (Backcover blurb: “A frog sits peacefully in a meadow. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he is attacked by an umbrella-wielding mouse in a confrontation that quickly turns into a full-scale war.”)

See also Mem Fox’s fable, “Feathers and Fools“, about the peacocks and swans who start to fear one another because of their differences. The preparation of weapons leads to war and total annihilation — except for one peacock egg and one swan egg. Will the baby birds recognize each other’s similarities, or differences?

<NEW> books on display until end of Thursday: Forty <NEW> books went on display last Friday and borrowing/reserving of them starts this Friday. Students are encouraged to keep track of which new books they want to read, then it’s first-come, first-serve on Friday morning for both borrowing and placing reservations.

Highlights include:

* 4 new Michael Morpurgo novels: “Cool“, “The Nine Lives of Montezuma“, “The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips“, and “Alone on a Wide Wide Sea“. (This last one features a man who is shipped from Britain to Australia as an orphan after WWII and suffers the equivalent of child slave labor on a farm before escaping and growing up to become a boat builder. His daughter later sails single-handedly back to England to try to track down his long-lost sister. Note: the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a recurring theme throughout the novel.)

* “The Greatest Power” (picture book) by Demi, a sequel to “The Empty Pot“. In this story Ping, now emperor, asks the question ‘what is the greatest power?’. Only Sing, a young girl, comes back with a lotus seed and the right answer.

* “Beastly Tales: six crazy creature capers” by Richard Tulloch, his most recent book, suitable for Grades 2 and upwards.

* “On the bike with… Lance Armstrong“, a biography for younger readers.

* Two Dr. Seuss classics we didn’t have before: “Horton Hears a Who“, one of his longer rhyming stories about caring for others (because “a person’s a person, no matter how small”), and “Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now“, one of beginner reader books. Note that the Marvin K. Mooney book is supposedly a political allegory about Richard M. Nixon (see the Wikipedia entry on the book).

* “Shrek” by William Steig — the picture book that inspired the popular movie. We also have his award-winning picture book, “The Amazing Bone” on display.

* “The Tough Guide to Fantasyland” — Diana Wynne Jones’s satiric A-Z of the elements of the fantasy genre. As the Amazon.com review says,

“The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (U.K. Edition) was a 1997 Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee. It’s a good companion to Jones’s Dark Lord of Derkholm, a fantasy about what happens when your land is turned into a theme park for questing tourist parties. Fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books will enjoy both.”

* “Seeker“, the first in a new fantasy trilogy (’The Noble Warriors’) for older readers by William Nicholson, author of the ‘Wind on Fire’ trilogy.