Thanks to All of You!

Thanks to all of you who have stopped by here to read posts, check out reviews, interviews or book lists here at Alice in Baker Street!!  The blog just hit over 10,000 views which is AWESOME!

The new semester just kicked off this week, and this spring I'm taking some great classes, three English courses and one Art studio course : Golden Age of Children's Literature, Literature for the Young Child, an Independent Study focusing on soon to be determined topics in children's lit, and an Illustration class!!

Coming soon I'll be posting a 5 part series honing in on what makes fairy tales fairy tales by way of illustration analysis, so stay tuned for that :)

Hope all of your New Years are off to fantastic starts!!

Presentation Recap Part 1: "Oh, You Mean the Caterpillar Guy?"

So, I've been pondering how best to recap my talk...  What I've decided to do is I've embedded my Prezi here in this post and I'm also providing links to the videos which were made specifically for my presentation as well as a video featuring Jon Klassen from Candlewick's Year of the Picture Book video series, which we also watched during my session.  In the next week I will be posting hopefully a short video recapping my talk, if not a video than a written summary, to go along with the Prezi so that it will make more sense, for example explaining why on earth I started my presentation with "The Gross Clinic", which you may find to be an odd place to start if you're just looking at the image slideshow below!  But I wanted to go ahead and post this "Part 1" of my recap so you can see the videos and the Prezi slideshow.  Hope you enjoy and look forward to hearing from all of you (and I thank all who gave me great feedback that Saturday at KidLitCon!  And to all of you who did attend, feel free to leave me more comments below if you would like!)

Thank you to Aaron Becker, Travis Jonker and Lindsey Manwell for so graciously offering their time to make videos to go along with my presentation!!  Below I'm providing a link to the wonderful videos they made, it's so worthwhile to watch all of them and think about them in communication with each other because they offer great ideas from different angles on the same topic that they all love!

Here's a link to Aaron's video on the line between high art and illustration and the intent behind artists' work:

 https://vimeo.com/50186812 , password: kidlitcon 

Here's Travis' really fun video on a critical approach to picture books:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23330410/KidLitCon.m4v 

And here's Lindsey's video discussing the lines between illustration and high art, with discussion of artists who've transitioned between the two and some of her favorite illustrators ( I wasn't able to show this during my session for time consideration, so here's an extra surprise even for those of you who attended my session, and may have been wondering about Lindsey since her name was on my handout!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-Jw_wtYoEw&feature=youtu.be

Lastly, here's the video featuring Jon Klassen that I showed during my session as well, and it's from the collection of videos that Candlewick is putting out each day this year for their celebration of picture books! You should definitely check those out if you haven't already.  I specifically showed this because of Jon's great description of that magical middle space that children create when engaging with picture books:

http://vimeo.com/48605523

Also, in case you were at my session and were wondering about the picture books I had set up on "display", I pointed out a few things about them, but I forgot to say that the reason they were all there was that those 6 books (which I'll have pictures of after this sentence is done) are 6 picture books that have really stuck with me over the past few months, kept me thinking and wondering what makes them such wonderful creations!  They're all truly works of art!:

I couldn't find a better image :( I'll update when I do!

The last thing I should mention in this first part of my recap is that the second half of presentation focused on the way reviewers and adult readers of picture books can benefit from the Visual Literacy methods used by teachers, librarians, etc.  I specifically addressed the Whole Book Approach, developed at the Eric Carle Museum, and Visual Thinking Strategies.  I will go into these briefly in my overview, but in case you're interested to know more in greater detail you should check out this talk by Megan Lambert, available in audio here: http://www.fairfieldpubliclibrary.org/child-pod-meganlambert.htm   Also, here's a great PDF, which has been very helpful for me in implementing the Whole Book Approach in the program where I teach, which lays out the strategy and how to use it: http://montessori-images.com/downloads/The%20Whole%20Book%20Approach.pdf

Library Books and upcoming posts

So first of all I just thought I needed to post this picture here!  I'm not even joking my family and I just returned all of those books to the library today, and they were all due today, it's not like they've been accumulating and are late and we are just now returning them...nope we just had THAT many books out.  To be fair I guess I should say that many of them were for our planning for Ancient History read alouds and picture books, which we will be re-checking out but still I think I might have a library problem...  :)

Also, this weekend, I'm hoping to write up two posts:
One finally on my thoughts on the Hunger Games trilogy, I finished Mockingjay yesterday and WOW! it was pretty incredible.

 And the second post will be on a new illustrator I discovered this week, so excited to show you some of his work which I found around the internet, truly wonderful.

(It was hard to pick one image to peak your interest in my new find, but finally decided on this one! and one more)

The Bad Beginning...

Here begins a recorded journey through the dark woods and Neverlands of children's literature, and life more generally as we know it.

My excitement at finding the following article on NPR finally convinced me to start this blogging chronicle which I have been meaning to start for months.  So "here we go!!!!"

The link below includes an article summary and audio interview with Martin Salisbury on his new and beautiful book on the art of visual storytelling, enjoy: http://www.npr.org/2012/04/23/151053393/the-artistry-of-childrens-picturebooks-revealed