 Hi everyone. My name is Steph and you may have noticed that this channel has had a slight rebrand and is now called Kid Lit Joy. And it's because I just want to share my love of kids literature. It honestly is one of the most joyful reading experiences I have in any given week, reading children's literature. So we are rebranding just a little bit. And this is the start of a weekly wrap up series where I'm going to be talking about the children's literature books that I have read this week across varying purposes, whether it's read at work or whether they're books that I have just picked up for myself and are not part of another project for this channel. So we're going to jump straight in. And this is Week 1's Reading Diaries. We're going to kick off with a couple of books that I did read at work. And the first one was Welcome to Country by Auntie Joy Murphy. This one is an Indigenous text. It is written by an Aboriginal elder who is local to where I live here on Wurundjeri country. And I have read this book many, many times. I absolutely adore it because it really unpacks what a Welcome to Country is versus what an acknowledgement of country is. And I have an acknowledgement of country at the start of all of my videos because I am living on stolen land and I am incredibly lucky to live in such a beautiful place. But I continuously acknowledge that this land was here well before me and that there were people who were the caretakers and who continue that tradition to this day. So this book is a Welcome to Country from an Aboriginal elder. It has absolutely gorgeous artwork and it really does go through what it means to be welcome on country. And every Aboriginal group in Australia has a slightly different Welcome to Country ceremony. So this is just one that is local to our area, which was important because we were looking at creating an acknowledgement of country for our classroom and for thinking and reflecting on what that means for us. We also read Why I Love Summer by Michael Wagner, which is an absolutely gorgeous book. It's a really wonderful, persuasive text for early primary as well if you're looking for something like that. But this one is really a celebration of enjoying your summer break. And it is very, very Australian, which is why I picked it because we were writing about our summer break. And we used it as a mentor text to talk about, okay, well, the characters in this story, they did a lot of things, which of these things were things that we participated in during the summer break. We had a lot of fun sort of unpacking everything from swimming pool trips to beach trips to backyard picnics to spending all of your evenings outside. All of that wonderful summer experience was included in this book. And then we use that as a mentor text to jump into our writer's notebooks and to just put all of our thoughts about our summer breaks on the page. There was no specific text type or requirement for them to actually do something the way that I told them to do. It was very much a however you want to represent your summer, please do. And we had amazing things like the things I liked and disliked about summer. We had top three lists, we had comics, we had Polaroid pictures with labels. It was just really wonderful to see like it was a really great way to talk about our summer without feeling very prescriptive. I was also reading The Crowns Go Back to School by Drew DeWalt and Oliver Jeffers. This is obviously part of The Crowns series and is highly entertaining. This is The Crowns Going Back to School making friends. It's a great back to school book for Kinder Foundation grade one. But it does have some great themes that you could pull out if they're in terms of a new year, is a new start, new friends that you can make being open to new experiences. Like it's a really wonderful story and most kids enjoy The Crowns books because they're pretty humorous. I also read The Word Collector by Peter H Reynolds, which is a book I want to actually read in the coming weeks with my class because it is very much about a child who has a love of words and a love of collecting words. And that's something I would like to instill in my class. I talk about vocabulary a lot when I talk about books because books are one of the greatest ways for us to continue to grow our vocabulary outside of our spoken vocabulary, which can be quite limited because quite often the words and the language we use in books is different to our spoken language. And so it is a really great way to just become word curious and to become word nerds. So I absolutely love this book. It's gorgeously illustrated. Peter H Reynolds always does a great job. And then finally another book that I read. This is very much a growth mindset kind of book is Can You Teach a Fish to Climb a Tree by Jane Godwin, which is essentially all about celebrating our uniqueness, celebrating that we all have our own strengths and that we all have things that we are really good at. But if we try to force ourselves into a situation where we are comparing ourselves against something that is not us, then we don't feel success. We don't feel good and we need to acknowledge our strengths and our passions and how we can utilize that to the best of our ability to move ourselves forward towards our goals rather than trying to fit into someone else's goals. So I really appreciated this one. Jane Godwin always does a great job with her books. And I'm looking forward to reading this in class at some point for part of our inquiry unit. So that is my reading diaries wrap up for this week. I will leave all of those books linked down below if you want to find out more information about any of them. In the comments I would love to know what you have been reading in the past week. Otherwise feel free to leave me a fish emoji down below. I hope that we are on the world just staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.