CBCA Book Week 2014 – Connect to Reading

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Children’s Book Week this year is coming up on 16-22 August.   It’s a  special week on the Australian literary calendar as an opportunity to highlight quality Australian children’s literature and, as the 2014 theme suggests, spend the week connecting readers with great stories.  We are fortunate in Australia to have a strong community of writers and enthusiasts supporting the writing of children’s and adolescent’s literature.  They are ensuring stories are written through Australian eyes and embedded into young minds at a time when our identity can be diluted by the mass of other pursuits that fill the lives of young people.

School libraries in particular plan this week as an opportunity to connect with readers, their teachers and their families.  Visiting authors conduct writing workshops, book highlight activities are planned and special efforts are made to tie the event into student programs.

The new Australian Curriculum also supports the role of local literature in our students’ lives stating:

The presence of Australian literary texts and an increasingly informed appreciation of the place of Australian literature among other literary traditions will be part of the national English curriculum.  Australia’s evolving ethnic composition and the increasing national importance placed on our geographic location in the Asia-Pacific region brings with it a variety of cultural, social, and ethical interests and responsibilities. These interests, and the collective cultural memories that have accumulated around them, are represented in a range of literatures including the inscriptional and oral narrative traditions of Indigenous Australians as well as contemporary Indigenous literature.
To assist you in making the most of the 2014 CBCA Book Week, here are a few resources to launch ideas:
We’d love to hear if you have more ideas to share?  Please ‘leave a reply’ to this post.

Promoting reading

Australian publishers such as Penguin and Allen and Unwin are now providing some really great content on their websites for YA readers.

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Between the lines blog is Penguin’s offering while Allen and Unwin’s Teen page is their home for YAs.

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These sites are fantastic for promoting reading as they contain:

  • book trailers
  • author blogs
  • opportunities for students to review books and have the reviews published online
  • sneak peek
  • enewsletters
  • news

and more. All of these resources make it easier to promote reading to students. I would love to hear what other publishers are doing.