Book Week is coming soon!

Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year: Younger Readers

Entries in this category may be fiction, drama or poetry and should be appropriate in style and content for readers from the middle to upper primary years.

Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year: Early Childhood

Entries in this category may be fiction, drama or poetry and should be appropriate in style and content for children who are pre-reading or early stages of reading.

Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year

Entries in this category should be outstanding books of the Picture Book genre in which the author and illustrator achieve artistic and literary unity or, in wordless picture books, where the story, theme or concept is unified through illustrations.

Eve Pownall Award for Information Books

Entries in this category should be books which have the prime intention of documenting factual material with consideration given to imaginative presentation, interpretation and variation of style.

Each year, across Australia, The CBCA brings children and books together celebrating Children’s Book Week. Book Week this year is from Monday 22nd  to Friday 28th August. During this time Schools, Libraries, Booksellers, Authors, Illustrators and children celebrate Australian Children’s Literature.

2016 Theme:  Australia! Story Country.  

For a list of this year’s shortlisted books go to: https://cbca.org.au/shortlist-2016

K.H.P.S will celebrate Book Week by enjoying many of the shortlisted books and responding to them in different ways. We will also have a special dress up day and a book swap.

DRESS UP DAY

We will be having a dress up day on Friday 26th August. Students can come to school dressed as a character from a book.

THE GREAT BOOK SWAP

On Friday 26th August we’ll be hosting The Great Book Swap to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation which is an important charity.

Research shows that Indigenous children in remote and very remote locations are being out-performed by non-Indigenous children and children living in urban locations.

Statistics show that between 40 to 60 per cent of Indigenous children in very remote locations across WA, SA and NT achieve below minimum standard of reading in Year 3.

The results of the Australian Government’s 2015 Closing the Gap report showed that:

• School attendance rates are as low as 14 per cent in very remote areas of Australia
• Statistically, there has been no significant improvement between 2008 and 2014 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at or above the national minimal standard in reading and numeracy across the eight measures. (Ie. in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9).
• In 2014, 34.9 per cent of Indigenous students in very remote areas met or exceeded the national minimal standard for Year 7 reading.
• Results for non-Indigenous students show less variation by area remoteness, but for Indigenous students, the gap is much wider in very remote areas than it is in metropolitan areas
• About 70 per cent of Indigenous students achieved the Year 5 national minimum standards in reading and numeracy. There were significant declines in some states across some year levels. The Northern Territory has the lowest proportion of children achieving minimal standards.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation is taking action to improve this through a number of strategies:

• We send new, carefully selected books to remote Indigenous communities across Australia.
• Our early literacy project Book Buzz involves supplying packs of board books. In some communities it has included translations into first language.
• We work, often in partnerships with other organisations, to fund literacy projects in remote communities
• Thanks to a generous bequest from children’s author Pamela Lofts, we are running literacy workshops with aspiring young Indigenous writers and illustrators

To help us raise money for this worthy cause please bring your old books to school as donations for us to sell. There is a box at the entrance to your child’s learning centre. If you would also like to make an additional donation please go to: https://indigenousliteracyfoundation.secure.force.com/Donate/2015