OPAC stands for Online Public Access Catalog and means many resources for our patrons.
Here’s the top ten books checked out in March. What was your favorite for the month of March?
Click on the book cover to see our OPAC record for the book. If you sign in with your library username and password, you’ll be able to put a hold on the title. Click here for a tutorial. Don’t know your library login? Come see us at the library.
Dogo News is a website that features news reported by kids. It’s updated daily and makes an effort to include news of international interest. A perusal through the most recent headlines include reports on space junk, the Indian festival of Holi, the world’s oldest paragliding grandmother and the impact of global warming on the island nation of Kiribati.
The site also features reviews by readers of books and websites, and an interactive world map. Moving your cursor over the world map reveals pop ups that pinpoint the location of the current events that have been featured on the news page.
All in all, this seems like a great website for current events and an excellent model of newspaper writing for elementary students. We have included a link to it on our Current Events page of the library OPAC’s Visual tab. We hope that you will consider posting your own reviews and comments.
Thanks to Ms. Wang who shared the link from her conference in Bangkok.
DOGO News – Kids news articles! Kids current events; plus kids news on science, sports, and more!.
The Dogo News button is on our Current Events-Many Languages button. Click here for a post with instructions on how to access that.
Tags: 2011-2012·current events
We had a great discussion this morning in our book club meeting and two new members. I had a lot of fun and am excited about going on to our fourth meeting in April. Thanks, ladies, it’s always a pleasure to talk books with you.
The book selection for March was Paul French’s Midnight in Peking, a fascinating true crime novel about a murder in 1937 of a young British woman in Beijing. The group agreed that that although the mystery was interesting, the best part about this book for us was connecting the Peking of 1937 to the Beijing we know now. Several of us hadn’t noticed that the book included a map of Peking in the endpapers and we spent several minutes poring over it, noticing the places mentioned in the book and also the landmarks that we can still see today. You can download a discussion guide and a guided audio tour of Beijing to go with the novel from the Penguin Publisher’s website: http://www.midnightinpeking.com/book-clubs/.
Our book selection for April will take us to Europe and the US, living the immigrant experience. It is Away, by Amy Bloom. This is the story of a Jewish Russian woman who’s family was destroyed in a pogrom and who flees to the US. There she finds out that her 3-year-old daughter is still alive and so she resolves to walk back to Siberia. Based on a true story, Amy Bloom shares her inspiration in this Amazon video. Click here to download the discussion guide for Away.
Please register for the book club by filling in the online form on the left sidebar. Please do so even if you are an existing member. This allows us to collect your email address and helps us document the success of our book club.
What happens after a fairy tale ends? What do Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Jack, the Giant and the Three Little Pigs do for fun? What if Sleeping Beauty were a dragon? What if the Frog Prince likes being a frog and wants to be changed back?
If you’re looking for the answers to these questions – and even if you’re not! -, you might find them in a fractured fairy tale. We call a fairy tale a fractured fairy tale when the author takes a well-known story and changes it a bit to answer all those pesky questions.
Grade 4 students are starting a language arts unit on writing narratives, and they are looking at fairy tales for inspiration. Of course, they know that the normal fairy tales are found in our 398.2 section, but the fractured fairy tales are mostly found in the E fiction section (the picture books) and are arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name. I created a list of fractured fairy tales for the grade four students to refer to during this unit, and for all of our patrons who enjoy a bit of fairy tale fun.
To get to the fractured fairy tales list, you’ll need to go to the library OPAC, http://library.istianjin.net. Then, follow these simple steps.
1. Click on the Visual tab.
2. Click on Book Lists.
3. Scroll down to find Fractured Fairy Tales and click on the button.
4. Read through the list and find your favorite. If you need help locating the book on the shelves, please ask a librarian.
Tags: 2011-2012·genre·Grade 4·languagearts·OPAC
The IST Library Book Club has already read two books this year! Our first was a young adult novel, Girl in Translation, by Jean Kwok, and we had a great session today on our February choice, Out of Shadows, by Jason Wallace.
We’re raring to go and read our next book, Midnight in Peking, by Paul French. This is a non-fiction book about a mysterious murder that occurred in 1937 in Beijing. The author reconstructs the murder using letters and other documents from the time. There’s reference to the Tianjin concessions of the time. All in all, it promises to be a riveting read with lots of connections to our life in China.
The IST Library Parent Book Club is open to all parents of the IST community. We welcome new members and invite you to register online through this blog. Simply click on the link on the top left corner of this page to access the registration form.
Our next meeting will be 28 March, from 8 to 9 am, in the library. Till then, happy reading.
Let’s start with a few question: Is Chinese the most difficult language in the world? Are Chinese characters impossible to learn?
Click this link: View Character Movie and hope you will agree with me that there really is an easy and cool way to learn this language. Practice with the magic pen and enjoy the learning experience.
On the same page the explanation of the character is introduced in both English and Chinese with samples and frequency. e.g. 好 (hǎo): 17.451‱
If you are curious about how many Chinese characters you know please check 500 most common Chinese characters. View IST World Language wiki for more online Chinese learning tools.
View Character Movie
Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is now on the big screen and available at all major Tianjin cinemas. The movie is based on the book by the same title written by Michael Morpungo. Joey the horse recalls his experiences growing up on an English farm, his struggle for survival as a cavalry horse during World War I, and his reunion with his beloved master.
The library has both English and Chinese versions of War Horse and a Playaway, a dedicated audio media player. 战马 is the Chinese name of the movie. 战 (zhàn) means war and 马 (mǎ) is horse.
Please see the links below for the plays of the movie:
Jinyi Aocheng, the movie center near E-Mart
Tianjin Binhu, the cinema at the Cathay Future area
Read the book, watch the movie and let us know what you think about it!
image from MTime
The top ten books checked out in February include several Panda Books and a few old favorites.
1. Germs! An epic tale on a tiny scale, by Martin Howard.
2. Interrupting Chicken, by David Ezra Stein.
3. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.
4. We are in a Book! by Mo Willems
5. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins (the sequel to The Hunger Games)
6. TimeRiders: The Eternal War, by Alex Scarrow.
7. Art & Max, by David Weisner
8. The Call, by Michael Grant
9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin fever, by Jeff Kinney
10. What is a Princess? by Jennifer Weinberg
What books did you most enjoy this month? Tell us in the comments.
Note: We have linked each title to a review page from the library OPAC’s TitlePeek feature. Please let us know if the links do not work. Germs is the only book without a review but there isn’t one available for it.
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