Ack! What happened to last week? Two out of three kids home sick…one PD day…tour details to attend to.
Tour?
Yes:
5 Cities 5 Days 11 Presentations
That will be next week for me. Canadian Children’s Book Week beginning November 14 will see me in Ottawa, Kingston, Hamilton, Toronto, and London. This is this year’s poster.
I’m really looking forward to touring with Scot Ritchie as we talk to kids about our Grade 1 Giveaway Book. Hope everyone celebrates with a book or two–or seven (it’s a WEEK after all).
I’ll try to blog about it. But this means there’s technology to master this week, and maybe some other posts here on some other stuff I’ve been up to this year.
If you smell smoke, it’s not your neighbour burning leaves, it’s my brain.
I love Halloween. This year I bring you the Legend of the Flying Canoe, or La Chasse-galerie.
I came across this Quebecois legend while researching Let’s Go!. You cannot have a history of transportation in North America without a canoe. Of course there was no place for this legend in my book, but I find it fascinating all the same.
Couple together a canoe with a story involving the devil and you’ve got a Canadian Halloween classic…okay, so what if the actual story involves New Year’s not Halloween? To me it’s a better story for this time of year.
The animated National Film Board film of the legend is definitely worth a watch. It’s about 10 minutes long. Roch Carrier retold the story in The Flying Canoe, published in 2004 by Tundra Books. The legend has even made it onto a postage stamp, as seen here.
And it’s Canada, so there’s even a beer alluding to the legend. (It’s good, too.)
So here’s to Halloween! And may your travels tonight or today lead you safely home.
The courier came with my copies of the TD Grade One Giveaway editions of Let’s Go! and On y va!
Wow. They are lovely. What can I say? Thank you to all involved!
It’s the first time I’ve seen the French edition. Someone around here remarked to me that they didn’t know I spoke French that well. Um, like I told them, I don’t. The credit for that goes to the translators. My grade 13 French is a little rusty, but I did manage to read the translation. Fascinating to see my words transformed into another language. And high praise to them for making the translation work in the space they had to fit it into!
I’m looking forward to touring some of Southern Ontario this coming Book Week. Appropriately enough, it might involved several modes of transportation (car, train, bus…).
Today is my two-year blogoversary! Where does the time go? So I suppose I’m feeling a little nostalgic and hope you’ll allow me a little diversion down memory lane. When I was in elementary school, unlike my own kids, we didn’t get regular movies during lunchtime. In fact, we didn’t have DVDs or even VCRs to show movies for those times we actually did get to see movies.
Movies were rather rare occurrences so they were a pretty big deal. When the teacher wheeled in a tall squeaky metal cart with a big reel projector on top, she also reached to the ceiling for the string and pulled down the white projector screen. The lights were dimmed. Then the countdown began as the reels click-clicked and whirred away. It was all very exciting.
Except we saw the same movies–a lot.
One of the movies we saw regularly (like at least once a year) was Paddle to the Sea. I loved that movie. It’s the story of a toy carved wood canoe and its journey by meltwater, creek and river to the sea. A few years ago I came across the book by Holling C. Holling in a library sale bin and promptly bought it for a bargain. (The copy I bought was an early printing, much dog-eared and worn.) I thoroughly enjoyed sharing the story with my son as it brought back my memories of the film.
So imagine my delight to stumble upon the actual link to the actual NFB film by Bill Mason a few days ago! I watched it again, all 20 some minutes of it. To me it’s a classic.
Ack! What happened to last week? Two out of three kids home sick…one PD day…tour details to attend to.
