Red Cedar Book Awards

Students in grades 4-7 have been reading the Red Cedar book award nominees since the fall. There are 12 nominees for fiction and 12 nominees for information books. Information about the Red Cedar book award program can be found here.

During Canadian Children's Book Week, we held our official Blair Library Red Cedar voting on Thursday, May 5th in the library at lunchtime. Eligible students (students who had read at least five of the books) filled out their ballots, had a cupcake with the Red Cedar symbol on it, received their certificates and then we tallied the votes together as we discussed the different books.

Although we submitted our vote totals to contribute to the provincial totals we definitely had some favourites here at Blair. The Curse of Akkad was the favourite information book and the favourite fiction books (novels) were Graveyard of the Sea, Libertad and Starclimber.

On Monday, May 15th, the winners of the Red Cedar Book Awards were announced. Over 2000 votes came in from all across BC. The information book award winner is: Everything But The Kitchen Sink by Frieda Wishinsky and Elizabeth MacLeod. The fiction award winner is: Libertad by Alma Fullerton.

We're looking forward to hearing what books will be nominated for next year!

Ted Staunton visits the Blair library!

As part of Canadian Children's Book Week, the Blair library hosted acclaimed Canadian author Ted Staunton today. In preparation for his visit, the girls from division 8 helped me put together a book week bulletin board and three boys from division 2 created a welcome banner.

We also read Ted's book Puddleman and the first chapter from his latest Morgan book, Music by Morgan. Today during the primary library times, I read the book The Day Eddie Met the Author by Louise Borden to help the students think about "big" questions they could ask the author.

Ted did two presentations this afternoon. During the first session, divisions 8, 9 and 10 listened to Ted play the banjo and they sang along with him as he sang She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain.

Ted read his picture book, Simon's Surprise with the students and had them all joining in.

Ted then showed the students his first version of Puddleman with his own drawings which the students could really relate to...it looked like a book they could make! Victor, from division 8, got to participate as the main character, Michael.

Divisions 6 and 7 listened to Ted read excerpts from some of his novels for older students. One that the students really enjoyed was Forgive Us Our Travises and the episode with the can of soda pop! I bought the book today for our library and I am guessing we'll need to do that experiment next week in the library! He also discussed the writing process a lot with these two classes and highlighted that writing is all about making choices - choices about the best words to use, choices about what makes the story interesting, choices about the order of events, etc.

 Again, he showed the students his first version of Puddleman (which he originally called The Revenge of the Puddleman) which really inspired the students.

During our lunch together, Ted opened his email and found that his publisher had just sent him the final proofs of his next Morgan book. Ted hadn't seen the illustrations yet and he didn't know what the final title was to be until he opened his pdf document. He decided he would like to show it to the students so we hooked up our projector and divisions 6 and 7 at Blair Elementary were the first readers in all of Canada to read parts of the next Morgan book. So cool!

Ted finished off his presented with a fun song from the jug bottle band he plays in back in Ontario.

We had a great afternoon celebrating Canadian Children's Book Week with Ted Staunton!

Ms Novakowski

Puddleman by Ted Staunton

Last week, the primary classes read the picture book Puddleman by Ted Staunton. It seemed appropriate with all this puddley weather we've been having! Also, Blair Library is fortunate to be hosting a visit by Ted Staunton next week as part of Canadian Children's Book Week!
I told the students that when Miss McPherson and I went to university together to do our Bachelor of Education degrees, that this was one of the books we learned about in our reading course!


The students LOVED this book! I asked students from each class to do short video book reviews.

From division 7, Sarah and Liat:

From division 8, Andy and Areej:

From division 9, Creighton and Thomas:

And from division 10, Conner and Emily:

Hopefully, we won't have any puddlemen coming into the school!
Ms Novakowski