Library Introduction with Scaredy Squirrel

From the University Elementary School

64 Homemade Character Costumes – and I Still Don’t Know What To Be

Inspiration: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr.

Inspiration: Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

Inspiration: Cindy Lou Who from Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

The above photos were borrowed from a collection of 64 character-based, home-made costumes, with instructions at About.Com Family Crafts.

And here’s a list of 60 Favorite Book Character Costumes.

For several years I dressed for school on Halloween as “Ms Kill” (a play on my name: Kilpatrick). I claimed to be Mrs. Kilpatrick’s older sister who had to work on Halloween because it was too scary for her (me). I wore a high-necked, long sleeved lace-edged blouse, a suit vest, long black skirt and ‘sensible’ shoes. I ‘aged’ my face with make-up, ‘horn-rimmed’ my glasses with electrical tape cut-outs and put spiders in a grey wig made into a bum and netted.

I was nasty and spent all day telling the kids to ‘shhhhh’. They got the idea that Ms Kill wasn’t very nice and loved to try to make me laugh, which was Not Allowed – I’d screech, “No frivolity in the library!” – but they really didn’t get the ‘librarian’ reference and I tired of the repeated act. Besides, as the year’s go by I need less ‘aging’ make-up and that is no fun.

Since then I’ve gone as a wispy ghost (that was fun, I was completely disguised), a failed “Where’s Waldo” (few kids guessed right) and a witch (cliché). Don’t know what I’ll be this year, I’m uninspired. I prefer ‘assembled’ costumes, rather than sewn (that’s just not going to happen), or purchased. Any ideas for me?

Canadian wins U.K. Costa Book Award for Children

‘Children’ must be a very broad category for this award, as judging from reviews and the book trailer, this book is definitely for the upper end of that category for which the Costa Book Awards, which “recognises some of the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland” has chosen Blood Red Road by Moira Young.

“It’s astonishing how, in her first novel, Moira Young has so successfully bound believable characters into a heart-stopping adventure. She kept us reading, and left us hungry for more. A really special book.” (link)

Trailer:

Originally from B.C. and now living in the U.K., Moira Young has trained as an actor, a dancer and, according to the Costa Book Awards, has now proven herself as a writer with this first novel in the Dust Lands trilogy. (source)

Blood Red Road, published by Simon & Schuster in June 2011 and already a movie in the making,  is a dystopian thriller set in post-apocalyptic Silverlake, “a dried up wasteland ravaged by constant sandstorms”. When the heroine, Saba, looses her brother to cloaked horsemen, she embarks on a quest to rescue him.

“At its best the novel mashes together McCarthy’s intensity with a laconic narrative style taken from the literature of the American west…At its worst it is a risible collection of clichés strung together by a barely coherent plot.” From The Guardian, which article concludes, “My nine-year-old daughter got hold of my review copy and was so entranced that I had to machete it into sections so we could both carry on reading it. Yes, this is the perfect apocalypse for pre-teens.”

Quill & Quire calls the dialogue, “quirky, folksy dialect that smacks of the Old West, with all its “yers” and “ain’ts”, and sums up with, “the magic of Blood Red Road is not that it is particularly original. Instead, Young has taken familiar pieces of everything from Gladiator to Lord of the Rings and put them in the hands of a spunky, moody heroine who breaths new life into old motifs.”

Audio book excerpt:

A selection of other reviews (there are many):

Reader reviews at Goodreads
The Book Smugglers
Alison’s Book Marks

I’m Not Alone Any More

When I began this journey, I tried very hard to find another school that had incorporated the bookstore model into their library. Although many public libraries have gone that way, schools are more reluctant for many good reasons. Now, thanks to a post at Notes From Linda, I have discovered that I’m not alone in messing with Dewey in my school library. The Red Hawk Elementary in Colorado has completely scrapped Dewey in their new library.

I didn’t quite go that far, but that was as much due to time constraints as conviction. It was enough to get the project done as it is over the summer without any more data entry and decisions than were involved in moving the books into one of 7 Islands and 54 departments.The books are still arranged by Dewey within their departments (1 to 4 shelves), but a book in the 300′s might be next to a book in the 700′s.

Related articles

• Melvil Dewey biography [OCLC - Educational resources] (oclc.org)

The Creators Deserve Credit

Weeding is a necessary evil and I have a lot of it to do, especially in light of my planned project. Who isn’t bothered by the painful if necessary process of disposing of out-of-date or even severely damaged books? An alternative is book sculpting. I am tempted to try my hand at it, but it is  a temptation I’m determined to resist until I manage to give something up or clone myself. One can always look and dream. At the very least I could supply an art teacher who isn’t afraid of a room full of sharp knives in the hands of teenagers.

So with my tea in hand and little motivation to really start my day this Saturday morning, I Googled “book art” and came up with some wonderful results. The first click was to this blog post by Monique Trottier. There are some gorgeous examples there, one of which was this creative and evocative sculpture.

Octopus

I tried to find the original artists of this image: sculptor and photographer. Tin Eye came up with 117 copies on the internet. (I still feel it is worth posting again even if only I get to see it when I want.) I only determined that it seems to be advertisement for Anagram Bookshop out of Prague but all attempts to find a site for even the bookshop failed. So this work and the image itself will go uncredited unless a reader more informed or more skilled at internet sleuthing comes by to enlighten me.