Tag Archives: reviews

Olympics are Go

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And we’re off. Our olympic display and competitions are open. We’ve even started a Scoop-It page especially about our Reading Olympics this term.  As you will see, teams Australia, Brazil and the USA are in the lead on borrowing and returning points. Who will win the cooked breakfast at the end of term?  It’s still any Form Class’ game with scores very close.

Congratulations Rosheka Warwick (8G) who was the winner of the first Olympic competition.  The next competition is Flags of the World so come in this week and have a go.

To feature our new books, we’ve kicked off another Scoop-It topic. Red Hot Reads, will give you a little more information about our new and not-so-new hot reads. Check it before you borrow.

We haven’t had a celebrity reader for a while. Hey we get pretty busy in the RC most weeks. Incredibly we’ve had 49,750  visitors through our doors in the first 6 months of this year! 

Jordan Morris  Celebrity Reader  13/07/12

 

 

My name is Jordan. I normally just like to read on my bed – nice and comfy. At the time I took the survey I was reading a Dr Who Book.  I have a few favourite authors, my absolute favourite being Robert Muchamore.  I loved reading his books as a child and still do. I’d like to meet Robert Muchamore, to discuss certain aspects behind his books.  Most of the books in our house are kept on the large bookcase in our sitting room.

I’ll probably take the Hunger Game series with me on my next holiday, I often read on holiday and I really want to reread the series before all the movies come out.  The last book I bought for someone was Sabriel by Garth Nix.  My most memorable reads would have to be The Cherub Series. I still remember waiting the long months for the new books to be released. The Harry Potter series I’ll never forget, I’m sure everyone loved these and I just waited in anticipation as a child. And lastly the FAYZ series, which I just devoured on a camping trip.

My favourite book(s) as a child were the Harry Potter series. I’d just love for the Cherub Series to be made into a film, seeing all the stunts they do in real life would be awesome!  Although, unless they work closely with the author it may be ruined!

 THANKS JORDAN !

 

 

Halloween and Globalization

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It’s Halloween this week in the library and we’ve a good few Horror Books on display. We hope you like the decorations. Yes it is an American celebration but social sciences classes have been doing a lot of research about globalization lately.  Click here to search for an article discussing globalized brands.

Many thanks to Madison Wills who helped with making some of the Halloween decorations, when she wasn’t culling books or filing newspaper articles in our vertical files in the G: Curriculum – Common – Vertical Files  sub-folders. You don’t need to know this path because now we have upgraded to V-LIBRARY. Now you will be able to find newspaper articles about e.g. floods by “ticking” the check box called, LAN on the new OPAC search screen. Type in the keyword “floods”  and wait for all the articles on the
network to be listed for you to inspect.  For  instructions/tutorials about how you use the OPAC -database search and other new features click on “Using the Library” above.

 Enter this week’s competition – email Mrs Robins if you know what the acronym OPAC means?

I had the pleasure of reviewing an Australian werewolf book this year written by Catherine Jinks. The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group was a real page turner.  Read the review.  Take the new OPAC terminal, our new netbook, for a spin and see if you can find this book on our shelves? Browse over 100 short reviews of Horror titles written by Teacher-librarians all around Australia by searching the CMIS Resource Bank in WA – choose subject and type Horror.

If you’re looking for popular Horror books, the Goodreads.com site is a good place to start.  We found a Best Vampire Books list and a Best Teen Horror/Suspense/Thriller list.   The monsterlibrarian.com site recommends some different vampire books and the list of Horror Novels for teenagers and young adults on the Bestbooks4teens.com site looks good too. This last list is a good place for senior students. Seniors should be reading mainly ‘crossover books’ which are read by both adolescents and adults. Here is a list of crossover titles.  We also have a 15+ section in Fiction. That’s all our news but if you heard Laurie Oaks give the annual Andrew Ollie Media Lecture last week, you would have heard him predict that in the future people will come to blogs to find out the news, not the nightly news on the television. Interesting.

 

Science Week and JCU Open Day

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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