Books for Boys and Girls

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 787, 20 August 1954, Page 20

Books for Boys and Girls

BOOKSHOPS can be depressing as well as exciting places. How are you to find your way among all the new books that pour from the presses? Parents will probably think such thoughts ("They can’t all be good"), among the displays for Children’s Book Week. Of course some guidance of a general sort is available for young readers and parents, for example, in Dorothy Neal White's Books Before Five (reviewed last week in The Listener), Kathleen Lines’s annotated list of reading for children from four to 14, or the British Council's publication by Frank Eyres, Twentieth Century Children’s Books, But what help is available from day to day? When The Listener set’ out to find an answer to this question it started at home and discovered that apart from its own quarterly list of children’s books (prepared by Broadcasts to Schools from review copies arriving in this office), several things are being done by the NZBS. All sorts of additional treading is suggested in School Broadcasts publications, guidance is given regularly-about once a fortnight-in the Correspondence School session, as well as by teachers to individual children, and in a monthly programme heard from YA and YZ stations in Women’s Sessions a small selection of new books for children is reviewed. New

books will be reviewed also in school holiday programmes mentioned on the opposite page, and in a talk by Pat Dennehy, of the School Publications branch of the Education Department, a number of children’s classics will be discussed. A call at the School Publications branch showed that something was being done there also, The School Journal has always given some guidance, and in the Journals. for Standard 3 to Form II, which adopted a new format and changed to a quarterly this year, about four pages of each issue are devoted to

reviews of books for children, These re-views---which are not all of new books -are written by Ngarita Gordon, librarian of the Ardmore Teachers’ Training College. From time to time extracts from books are printed and authors of children’s books write notes about their own work. Occasionally a reading list is included in the Journals for younger children. Books received by the School Publications branch are acknowledged in the Education Gazette, which teachers receive twice monthly; but a rather more valuable feature of this publication is an annotated list, prepared by the School Library Service, of books of interest to young readers. When we called on the source of this book list, we found that this branch of the National Library Service is all the time sorting good and bad from the thousands of books that are published As far back as 1950 it issued a printed list of junior fiction, indexed according to subject and.annotated to indicate why each book is worth reading, the age group for which it is suitable, the publisher and price. Issued to librarians but available to parents for inspection, this publication has been kept up to date with supplementary lists issued from time to time. Apart from preparing lists of this sort, officers of the Service throughout the country address many meetings of interested organisations-parent-teacher, nursery play centre, adult education and church groups and the like-on aspects of children’s read-

ing. Similar work has been done in broadcasts and, of course. on visits to schools. The Service is always willing to advise not only groups but individuals who write to it for help. Much of this accumulation of information filters through to parents and children by way of school and public libraries, which use also such publications as the news-sheets of the children’s and young people’s section of the New Zealand Libraries Association and book lists published overseas. The Listener saw some of the ways a librarian can pass it on when it visited the children’s section of the Wellington Central Library. There the large collection of children’s books has been broken up into what is, in effect, several smaller ‘libraries for various groups from the youngest to secondary school age, By the use of notices, special displays and posters (including selected lists of books on various topics) and even an illustrated explanation of the Dewey classification system, young readers are encouraged in a system of self-help, but we found when we put a question or two ‘to the librarian that she was very willing to help solve individual problems. One suggestion she made was that young people should keep lists of the books they read. This makes it easier to suggest further reading, and if comments on books read are jotted down at the same time they help young readers to develop discrimination in their reading.