World of Stories – Book Week

Library staff all contributed some worldly items to complement the cultural museum box, which was used to build our CBC Book Week display. We have thee competitions that will run until end of August so there’s still time to enter to win a book or anatomical keyring.  We’ve displayed statues and monuments of authors and book characters all week on our LCD screen hoping some will guess their identity or location. 

Why is Book Week still relevant to teenagers? We all get so caught up working hard on our next assignment,  we often forget that the absolute best way to do well on unseen tests (like Core Skills or NAPLAN) is to have a lot of recreational and wide reading over time.  And, reading literature for pleasure makes you a more interesting all-round person just like reading the newspaper or watching the news makes you a better citizen of the world!  

A sincere ‘Thank you’  to Collins Bookstore, Smithfield for donating book prizes and collating a small book fair/sale for us to inspect.  Check out our “World of Stories” display below or on AuthorStream,  if you missed our display last week.

Bookweek 2011

 

The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett, The Red Wind by Isobel Carmody, The life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher by Doug McLeod , Hamlet by Nikki Greenberg, Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley.  Many of the Book Week books and some new titles are currently on display on our library bookshelf below. Read more about the CBC Shortlist for 2011

 Last but not least, ever wanted to do some serious editing to a .PDF file and couldn’t find your original word document?  This free converter will impress – try it out.

Science Week and JCU Open Day

 

Last week the library combined two events; National Science Week and a promotion of the James Cook University Open Day  Aug 21.  The JCU Medical & Health Sciences Faculty Marketing Department  kindly supplied anatomical models and the Minister, Hon Cameron Dick,  visited the library on Wednesday while paying his respects to our own award-winning HOD Science, Mr Callin.  

Lots of students expressed interest in the JCU Course book for 2012 as well as our own title, “Careers in IT”.  We have two contests running until the end of August. The first is an anatomy quiz and the second involves writing a Nano Story (50 word story) mentioning one of the health science careers listed on the competition.  All our competitions this week and next week, which is book week, close at the end of August.  Snapshots of the Science Week/JCU display are sprinkled through the blog today.

Inspecting the Medical realia on loan from JCU

Sites to help you study & read

This week, we’ve added heaps of good research sites to our Library Bookmarks  like the Creative Commons website.  Search by tags or look down the lists to check if a list has been created for your assignment.  A very cool Study webpage for 13-17yr olds has just been launched by the Western Australian Government. Spend some time at STUDY VIBE and watch your grades improve.  The WA government has always been innovative, they have been running a journal featuring reviews of adolescent fiction for many years. You can  read the reviews online. Search the CMIS website for Book Reviews (search by title or author) You can even search for information pathfinders (search by topic) and be rewarded with a hotlist of websites.  This is one example of a book review which appears in the Fiction Focus quarterly journal and also in their online database. Here’s the review of “Lean on Pete”, a new novel on the shelves.

Steampunk

“Lean on Pete” is great for those of us who like realism, but hold onto your hats fantasy lovers, there’s a new genre to describe the speculative yet historical stories that are increasing in number. It’s “Steampunk”.  Explore these bookmarks from the Marcellin Library to learn more about Steampunk novels.

More visitors arrived from Hong Kong and were partnered up with eager Smithfield  students. Teachers, Ann, Petula & Ray spent some time with us in the library, while the students were off with their buddies.

Visiting students from Hong Kong using a library laptop