My mother is a mad cat lady

What would prompt a Year 1 student to say this while listening to Graeme Base’s new picture book, Eye to eye?  We had great fun with this book. Base has excelled once again. On the verso page is the silhouette that contains the clue and the right-hand side has the animal’s eye. When we reached page 33, and the students had to guess which animal or creature might live at the top of the world, little Miss Year 1 exclaimed that she knew it was a snow leopard. When asked how she knew she replied, “My mother is a mad cat lady!”
The students, from Prep to Year 5, enjoyed this book. They looked to find the teddy bear as he recurred throughout the book.

Eye to Eye | Graeme Base. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2015,
from http://graemebase.com/book/eye-to-eye/

Bottersnikes and Gumbles to be reprinted

For many years now I have bemoaned the fact that S. A. Wakefield's book, Bottersnikes and Gumbles was out of print and I didn't see any possibility of it being reprinted.

In May this year, my daughter, also a teacher, and her students wrote persuasively to Collins Australia.

"Dear Ms Barton

We are a Year 3 class at Immaculate Heart Catholic Primary school in Ipswich, near Brisbane. We have just finished reading the S.A Wakefield book Bottersnikes and Gumbles. We really LOVE this book and we know other kids our age would love it too. We know this book was originally published by Collins Australia and is no longer in print. We want this book republished and need your help.

Bottersnikes and Gumbles is a highly entertaining and fun book to read. We are not the only people who believe this. Mighty Nice, a Sydney-based animation studio must agree with us as they turned the first chapter into a short animation. You can view their work here: http://mightynice.com.au/work/client/bottersnikes-and-gumbles/

Wakefield’s characters are fabulously fantastic! Bottersnikes are fat, lazy creatures whose ears glow when they’re angry. We had a great time drawing our own Bottersnikes in class. Gumbles are cute, squidgy and happy little creatures. We had fun creating our own Gumble characters and moulding them out of clay.

Another reason we love this book is it is set in the Australian bush and the language has a real Australian flavour. Wakefield is clever with his language and we used his ideas to help write our own Bottersnikes and Gumbles stories.

If you are not the best person to be asking, could you please forward this email to the person who could get Bottersnikes and Gumbles republished.

Kind regards

Year 3 at Immaculate Heart Catholic School

&

Miriam Reid

Teacher"

Now, although we cannot prove that the students' pleas actually caused a publishing house to reprint the novel, we don't care. The book will hit the shelves this December.

The Year Three Students from Immaculate Heart believe that:

THEY MADE THIS HAPPEN

ON SALE Monday 14th December 2015

Price: $14.99

(a much kinder price tag than the $70 on eBay!)