YAB - Youth Advisory Board-Convincing and Creative

Put your best words forward! 6th, 7th and 8th graders, join us on December 1st at 7pm in the Quigley Youth Room for a debate on the best book you've ever read! Come prepared to voice and defend your choice and maybe learn something about a book you've never read! We'll also discuss the possibility of a future creative writing collaboration. All ideas and opinions are welcome.   Pizza will be served!

YAB, the Voice of pre-teens and teens at the Library, is open to all students in 6th, 7th or 8th grade and is sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries.  For more information stop by or call the Children's Department at 781-235-1610 ext 1108. 

 

I Want My Hat Back - The Horn Book

I Want My Hat Back

November 29, 2011 By Robin Smith 7 Comments

The bookseller at my local store was frantically restocking after the grand opening weekend and was making room to face out Jon Klassen’s wickedly funny I Want My Hat Back. After I commented on the book, she said, “I’ve read a lot about this book, but I have not had time to read it yet.”
“Come on, it’s a quick read. I promise you that kids are going to want to read it over and over, ” I laughed. I sure as heck wasn’t giving away the ending to this book. And I am not giving it away here either. I would never deprive a reader that exquisite pleasure of reading a book and guffawing at the twists and turns it takes. These animators (I am talking to you, Mo Willems and John Rocco) who write picture books have a special gift of pacing. They know when to stop putting words on the page.
According to the copyright page, these illustrations were “created digitally and in Chinese ink.” Using a brown palette with splashes of muted greens and browns and red, Klassen matched the typeface color with whichever animal is talking to the bear. When the animals talk to each other, their eyes face out at the reader, giving everything a shifty, don’t-take-us-too-seriously look. And, when rabbit enters the story, the reader notices two things: a red pointy hat and a lot of nervous red chatter. The bear barely (couldn’t stop myself) moves until he collapses, mourning the missing hat. When a deer arrives, eyes meet for the first time and we sense the shift in tone. The page turn makes it clear—a red hot page with all upper case text: Bear knows where his hat is and he is going to get it back.

Here is what I think the committee will love: pacing, humor, use of the color red amidst the sepia-hued pages, the color-coded text, the thick luscious paper, the hilarious ending, the scene where bear runs to the left to back track the story, the standoff (told only with the eyes), and the sly resolution. I know they will love the end papers and all the design, especially the use of white space.
Will they like the ending? Will they share this with children to see what they think of the ending? (I sure hope so!)
You have to go all the way back to 1996 to find a truly hilarious book (Officer Buckle and Gloria) wearing that gold sticker. Will this be the year for humor?

Annotated and Fabulous: The Phantom Tollbooth

Review of The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth

November 22, 2011 By Kathleen T. Horning

The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth
by Norton Juster; illus. by Jules Feiffer; annotated by Leonard S. Marcus
Knopf    284 pp.
10/11   978-0-375-85715-7   $29.99
Library ed. 978-0-375-95715-4   $32.99
If ever there were a twentieth-century children’s book that deserved an annotated edition, it’s Juster and Feiffer’s masterpiece, first published fifty years ago. Filled with wordplay, math puzzles, social satire, and irony, it’s a book that many young readers have returned to at different life stages, each time finding something new. In his introduction, Horn Book columnist Marcus provides biographical sketches of the author and illustrator, whose lives first intersected when they shared a duplex in Brooklyn and began to collaborate on a creative effort that would become The Phantom Tollbooth. Marcus frequently refers back to their creative process in meticulous margin notes that accompany the text. He also uses them to define and explain selected words and expressions (dillydally, toe the line); make connections between the text and the author’s life (Juster’s own toy car at age six, for instance, was a more modest version of Milo’s electric car); and point out references to literary works such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Also included in the marginalia are photographs and illustrations by artists who inspired Feiffer; for example, conductor Arturo Toscanini served as the model for Chroma, and a crowd scene that appears at the end of chapter eight shows the influence of Edward Ardizzone. Marcus’s insightful and often wry observations take us far beyond what we’d get from a careful and informed reading, as he had access to the book’s early drafts through Lilly Library at Indiana University, and he frequently includes original passages in the marginalia so that we can see how the story evolved. In-depth interviews with the author and illustrator further inform and elucidate the text. (Juster answers a burning question that’s puzzled readers for years: there is no secret code to be broken in the Mathemagician’s letter to Azaz.) Feiffer also gave Marcus access to many character sketches that are published here for the first time. With all the care and attention to detail that obviously went into this work, it’s unfortunate that the source materials aren’t cited with more specificity. Citations such as “N.J. Notes I, p. 35” aren’t linked with accompanying back matter; thus the note is as cryptic as the one written by the Mathemagician himself. But even with this shortcoming, the annotated edition is a welcome and important contribution to the field of children’s literature.

Overlooked, yet adored by all!

Fashionably late (by fifty years)

November 22, 2011 By Kitty Flynn

Here’s how K. T. Horning begins her review of The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth in the November/December 2011 Horn Book Magazine:
“If ever there were a twentieth-century children’s book that deserved an annotated edition, it’s Juster and Feiffer’s masterpiece, first published fifty years ago.”
And what did the Horn Book have to say about said masterpiece when it was originally published in 1961?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The book isn’t even mentioned until two years later, in the June 1963 issue. There, a crotchety and shortsighted David C. Davis, children’s literature professor at the University of Wisconsin, pans it in a grumpy article entitled, “Who’ll Kill the Mockingbirds?”
Mr. Davis begins: “The most overrated piece of writing reeking of blatant imitation appeared recently in Norman [sic] Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.”
And it goes downhill from there: “Had the book been given reliable critical analysis, it would never have reached the pages of a national magazine for previewing. To the children who love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and The Hobbit, this was a hodgepodge of words, dull, unrewarding, and completely lacking in humor, satire, or subtlety.”
What a difference fifty years can make.

In 'Hugo,' Scorsese Salutes A Movie Magician - NPR

November 18, 2011
In his 2007 children's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, author Brian Selznick tells the story of an orphan named Hugo who lives in the walls of a Paris train station and spends his time winding the clocks.

Now, director Martin Scorsese is coming out with a film adaptation of that book. The film, Hugo, is Scorsese's first 3-D project, and while it marks a creative departure for the man behind The Departed, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, it still deals with familiar territory. That's because while tracking the story of the young Hugo, the book also tells the story of the early days of filmmaking and the genius of real-life French filmmaker Georges Melies, who is played in the film by Ben Kingsley.

Melies was a magician before he started making movies around 1900. Brian Selznick tells NPR's Melissa Block that his book was inspired in part by Melies' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket zooms toward a moon with a human face on it.

AP

In Georges Melies' silent film A Trip to the Moon, a group of astronomers travels to the moon in a giant bullet.

"All of a sudden, with a cut of the camera, the rocket goes right into the eye of the man on the moon," Selznick says. "He's got the rocket in his eye, and white goo is kind of coming down where the rocket hit the moon, and he's sticking his tongue out."

That kind of imagery also fascinated Scorsese, who tells Block about his memories of watching Melies' work.

"I was fascinated by the sleight-of-hand concept," Scorsese recalls. "[Melies] saw the potential in these moving images, and these images that came up on the screen ... absolutely took me to another planet."

Melies had a hand in every aspect of his films, Scorsese says, from painting the sets to the costumes to writing the stories to figuring out how to make his ideas work on film. One — perhaps apocryphal — anecdote has Melies discovering the potential of cinematic tricks while shooting the exterior of the Paris Opera. The camera jammed just as a bus was going by, so Melies stopped shooting to fix the problem, then started rolling again. The interruption made it look like the bus simply disappeared from the frame.

"And he said, 'Well, I think I can do that in a studio,' " Scorsese says. "He invented what we do now — blue screen, green screen — he invented all of that."

For his new film, director Martin Scorsese worked to re-create the scenes of Brian Selznick's illustrated children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Jaap Buitendijk/GK Films

A Child's 'Sense Of Magic'

"If you ever wondered where your dreams come from when you go to sleep at night, just look around," Selznick's Melies tells a young Hugo. "This is where they're made."

Scorsese says Hugo is all about dreams, and as overworked as that idea may be in the movie business, it's particularly appropriate when it comes to a film based on a children's book.

"For children there's always a sense of magic," he says. "There's always a sense of something beyond the natural when you see the images move that way."

And he would know. Scorsese says he has fond memories of visiting friends who owned home movie projectors when he was a boy. "They projected some black-and-white cartoons. It was absolutely extraordinary to see that."

So making a film in 3-D was a natural next step, and one that allowed Scorsese to add depth to scenes of Hugo climbing on the train station's gigantic clock mechanisms.

"It sounds like a cliche, but the idea is that you're in the world with them," he says of his decision to film in 3-D. "When you start telling stories, you want sound, color, a big screen, so to speak, and depth. People have always wanted that, and so for me this was a great opportunity."

There was still a learning curve to using the new technology, but despite all that, Scorsese describes Hugo as one of the most rewarding experiences he's ever had making a film. It also may have helped that the characters in Hugo don't have a lot in common with the characters Scorsese usually works with, who "may not be the nicest people to be around."

"But you know, Taxi Driver in 3-D would have been interesting," he says. Just imagine a 3-D version of Robert De Niro asking a mirror, "You talkin' to me?"

"He'd be talkin' to ya," Scorsese says. "That would be amazing."

Anita Silvey on The Snowman by Raymond Briggs

When this time of year comes around, I always think of one of my favorite books first published in 1978, which truly captures the joy of playing in the snow. Although comic-book format picture books and graphic novels rule today, when Raymond Briggs used the wordless, comic-book format in The Snowman, he broke with the tradition of his time. However, the result was so magical than even adults who might have shunned comic books found themselves in love with his story.
In a book that works for preschoolers and those up to ten, a little boy awakes to find a snow-filled landscape and then goes out to build a snowman. But when the boy checks on his creation that night, it has come alive and tips its hat to the boy. Then the snowman enters the house, plays with the boy, and shares a meal with him. Finally, the two set off together on a magical flight that takes them over land and sea. In the morning, the boy goes out to find a melted snowman, an ending tinged with melancholy and loss.
As a boy, Raymond Briggs had always wanted to be a cartoonist. At fifteen, to pursue this dream, he became a student at the Wimbledon School of Art in London. Like other art students of the era, he received training in classical nineteenth-century composition, still-life and figure drawing. Eventually, he decided that he did not want to become a painter. However, when he finally returned to his childhood dream of making a comic book, he was able to bring all of his skills in draftsmanship, composition, and anatomy to The Snowman.
Although the landscape seems exotic, Briggs used his own home and garden in Sussex, at the foot of the South Downs, a few miles from Brighton. The snowman flies over the Downs to Brighton, and then the Royal Palace. Since Briggs wanted a feeling of childlike spontaneity in the drawings, he worked in pencil crayons to prepare the art. This media created a book with soft color, almost as if every page has been muted by the fallen snow.
The Snowman draws on the power of a persistent childhood fantasy—what if the snowman a child is building could come alive. This completely satisfying and moving book was adapted quite successfully as an animated film often shown on television during the holidays. As I checked this book out of the library recently, one young woman ran over and exclaimed, “I loved that book when I was a child!” Children still do. In The Snowman Raymond Briggs demonstrated how art alone, without any text, can convey a story that children delight in and remember.

Here’s a page from The Snowman:

Also recommended: Other books by Raymond Briggs: Father Christmas; Gentleman Jim

Originally posted December 23, 2010.

Read to a Dog --- they're great listeners! Boston Globe

Reading to dogs may have benefits for children

Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine student Sarah Perlmutter reads to a dog through the Grafton Public Library’s “R.E.A.D.” program. (Melody Ko/Tufts University)

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

What’s on your dog’s summer reading list?
A small pilot study by researchers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University provides preliminary, but suggestive evidence that reading aloud to man’s best friend can have positive effects on children’s desire and ability to read.
“The benefit of the dog is they’re not judgmental, and they are great listeners,” said Lisa Freeman, a professor in the department of clinical sciences at Tufts, who said the study was spurred by observations that having a canine audience seemed to increase children’s engagement with reading. “It really builds their confidence.”
The health effects of pet ownership have been the subject of a number of small studies, which have been far from definitive. Some research suggests that pet ownership provides a wellness boost -- one study found that dog owners who walked their dogs were 34 percent more likely to get 150 minutes of walking exercise per week compared with non-dog owners. But others have found pet ownership correlated with negative health outcomes, like a study of 424 patients admitted to the hospital with acute coronary syndrome, which found that pet owners, especially cat owners, were more likely to die or be hospitalized again.
For years, Freeman said, she had observed what appeared to be the beneficial effects of a reading program that paired children with canine listeners. But there was no evidence to support the anecdotal observations. So the Tufts researchers designed a simple study.
Over a five-week period last summer, 18 second-graders at the Grafton Public Library were randomly divided into two groups: for 30 minutes each week, half read aloud to a dog and half read to a person.
The children were allowed to choose whatever books they wanted, and read to the same dog each week, settling in on a large dog bed with their canine companion. Freeman noted that children seemed to prefer to read books about animals, seeming to want to choose stories the dogs could relate to.
“The kids seem to particularly like the dog-themed books; they seem to think the dogs really enjoy hearing about those,” Freeman said. Those who read aloud to a person might be corrected or prompted if they made a mistake, while the children reading to the dogs would be corrected through the dogs, meaning that the handler might say something like, “I don’t think she understood that last word.”
At the end of the five weeks, the children’s abilities were measured. This was a small sample, and the results were not statistically significant, but researchers saw a signal of a difference, with an increase in the words read per minute by the children in the dog group, and a decrease among children who spent the time reading to humans.
The researchers also measured the change in the children’s attitudes toward reading using a survey that involved a cartoon cat -- Garfield. The survey showed Garfield in a range of moods, from extremely satisfied to very upset, and was used to judge childrens’ attitudes toward reading. The dog reading group showed a slight favorable increase in their feelings toward reading, and the control group underwent a slight decrease. No children dropped out of the dog program, whereas a third of the children dropped out of the control group.
Ultimately, the researchers hope to be able to expand the study to a larger group, to see whether the effects hold up.
“Many dogs -- my dog, when she recognizes the building that the reading program is in, she gets very excited, really excited to go, so they seem to enjoy this too,” Freeeman said. “That’s important -- having everybody happy on both sides of the leash is going to be very important.”
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.

Tintin!

Coming December 21st, The Adventures of Tintin is the long-awaited film version of Herge's Tintin graphic novels!  The Adventures of Tintin series was created in 1929 by a Belgian artist who called himself Hergé. Clever and ever-curious, Tintin is a reporter-turned-detective whose pursuit of villains, criminals, treasure and the occasional artifact takes him all over the world, along with a colorful cast of friends. Hergé based his stories on real-world events and cultures that had caught the Belgian national attention — from space exploration to Arab oil wars — and brought them to life for his readers in inspiring and exciting ways.



For more about the movie, go to http://www.us.movie.tintin.com/

For more about the books, the author and the movie, go to http://us.tintin.com/

We have multiple copies of all the Tintin books (even the difficult to find The adventures of Tintin, reporter for Le Petit Vingtième, in the Congo and The adventures of Tintin, reporter for Le Petit Vingtième  --- in the Land of the Soviets !) in our juvenile graphic novel collection; stop by and check some out!

Daisy loves to read!

 Brittany gets up close and personal with Daisy...

The 2011 Best Illustrated Children’s Books - The New York Times

November 3, 2011, 12:00 pm

The 2011 Best Illustrated Children’s Books

By PAMELA PAUL

Sophie Blackall

The New York Times Book Review has announced its list of the 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2011. Artwork from this year’s winners will appear in the special Children’s Book section of the Book Review’s Nov. 13 issue.
The judges this year were Jeanne Lamb, the coordinator of youth collections at The New York Public Library; Lucy Calkins, the Richard Robinson Professor of Children’s Literature at Teachers College of Columbia University; and Sophie Blackall, an author and artist who has illustrated 24 books for children, including one of last year’s Best Illustrated winners, “Big Red Lollipop,” as well as “The Crows of Pearblossom,” “Spinster Goose: Twisted Rhymes for Naughty Children” and “Are You Awake?” — all published this year. They chose from among hundreds of children’s picture books published in 2011.
The Book Review’s 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books for 2011, in alphabetical order, are: “Along a Long Road,” written and illustrated by Frank Viva (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); “A Ball for Daisy,” written and illustrated by Chris Raschka (Schwartz & Wade); “Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures,” written by Katherine Paterson, illustrated by Pamela Dalton (Chronicle Books); “Grandpa Green,” written and illustrated by Lane Smith (Roaring Brook Press); “Ice,” written and illustrated by Arthur Geisert (Enchanted Lion Books); “I Want My Hat Back,” written and illustrated by Jon Klassen (Candlewick Press); “Me … Jane,” written and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); “Migrant,” written by Maxine Trottier, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault (Groundwood Books); “A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis,” written by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Kadir Nelson (Dial); and “A New Year’s Reunion,” written by Yu Li-Qiong, illustrated by Zhu Cheng-Liang (Candlewick Press). Next year, The New York Times Best Illustrated awards will celebrate its 60th anniversary.

Farmer Minor and Daisy!

FARMER MINOR & DAISY "PIG OUT ON READING"

Daisy and Farmer Minor have performed “Pig Out on Reading” programs across the U.S. for over 10 years and Daisy is known as the “World's Most Famous Pig,” having been filmed for Belgian National TV and featured in newspapers and TV across the United States.  Daisy became the first pig ever invited inside the U.S. Capitol while on her first national tour in 2002. Countless school principals, teachers, librarians, mayors, celebrities and hundreds of thousands of school children have kissed the famous pig; people kiss Daisy for a number of reasons ranging from promises kept to students for reading lots of books to fundraising efforts on behalf of non-profit groups, but mostly just for the wonderful love of Daisy! Meet Daisy at the Wellesley Free Library on Saturday, November 5th from 1:30 to 3 p.m. in the Wakelin Room.  Bring your cameras to capture that pig kiss forever!  This program is recommended for families with children ages three and up.

Iron Chef with the Youth Advisory Board!

Our second annual Iron Chef competition with the Youth Advisory Board was held last night and was an unquestionable success!  Three teams competed for prizes in two categories: best-looking creation and best-tatsing creation.  The teams were limited in the colors of the foods that they could use to create their dishes --- one team was limited to shades of pink and red, another could utilize only orange, and the third team was challenged with the assignment of green foods.  Celebrity judges were on hand, including Meg Davis from the Wellesley Middle School. 

The Volcano, created by the orange team!

Inspired by an Alaskan cabin in the woods, a red team submission.

The brilliance of the green team is evident in this womb-like dish...

The orange team!

The pink team!

The green team!

Rule #1 in Iron Chef: Always know where your retainer is!

Recommended graphic novel

Freshman: Tales of 9th Grade Obsessions, Revelations, and Other Nonsense by Corinne Mucha; Zest Books, 2011



Sweet and goofy, this graphic novel follows a girl through her freshman year in high school, with all of its social posturing and anxiety.  Annie makes and loses friends, tries new things (with mixed results), and learns to navigate her teenage world.  Available in the Quigley Youth Room in our Youth Graphic Novel collection.