 Hi everyone, my name is Steph. This is Little Bookish Teacher and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to be sharing with you some recent reads. So these are picture books, junior fiction, and new great titles that I have been reading recently and I thought I would share them in one video. I thought I would start with a picture book and that is Salty Mama by Sandra Kendall. This is a gorgeous narrative non-fiction story. There is a narrative but there is also non-fiction information spread throughout the book. So every page has the narrative and then it has information that explains sort of what's happening in the narrative. This is the story of Australia's crocodiles that live in the northern parts of Australia and we have Salty Mama who is a crocodile mama who is trying to look after her young. So we go through the process of her finding the right place to lay her eggs and taking care of her babies and as we read the story of her doing this we also find out particular information about crocodiles. So in this case we're talking about saltwater crocodiles and it was a really interesting read because I know quite a bit about Australia's crocodiles but to go back over this information and to also read it alongside a narrative it doesn't take away from the fact that these are very very very scary descendants of dinosaurs really but I think the more information you have the more you understand particularly scary animals and I think that's great for kids. The language in here is great. I love the way that certain words have been made bigger and bolder so that they stand out so we understand sort of why crocodiles behave the way that they do as well. They are very protective of their young and it was just a really enjoyable read. I have known about this book for ages. I just have not actually had time to sit down and read it so I was so glad that I did and I've got this to add to my collection because it is wonderful and just overall like narrative nonfiction is one of my favorite ways to read nonfiction particularly with younger students because it's so accessible and it just makes so much sense for them because you're learning everything in context. The next book I have to share is Fairy Bread by Ursula Dupasarski. This is one of the Puffin-Nibbles books so these books years ago were actually published and they had this bite cut out in them so they actually had that bite in the book so it was straight and then bumpy but they've been re-releasing them and these are great first chapter books. I think there's something like 40 or 60 pages long but they have quite large text. There are chapters in here so this makes them a great first novel and I have been starting to investigate these four book club sets for school which is why I picked this one up. I also thought it was fun because Fairy Bread is such an institution here in Australia. So this one is about Becky who is having her birthday and when her mum asks her what kind of food she wants at her birthday the only thing she wants is Fairy Bread, piles and piles of Fairy Bread and of course after the birthday there is just so much Fairy Bread left and Becky doesn't want to throw it out because that would be wasting it so she tries to come up with lots of different ways to use Fairy Bread until eventually days later her mum finally suggests a solution that might see that all the Fairy Bread gets put to use or doesn't. This was a really fun little book and it was great because I will be adding some of these to our book club selections particularly for Foundation 2 year 3. They're great because they are chapter books, they feature you know real-life examples and they have enough of a problem and solution in here that they can have a really good discussion about things so really glad to have this and I am planning at some point on doing a bit of a video series on books that would make great junior book club books because you can 100% have a book club with young students. I also read the second book in the Miss Mary Kate's Guide to Monsters. This book is called The Trouble with the Two-Headed Hydra. I did receive this last year as a review copy from Ellen and I'm when and it just got lost in my pile and I never got around to reading it so thank you very much to them for sending it to me. I have read the first book in the series and Miss Mary Kate is a young girl who lives with her mother who is a archaeology professor and Mary Kate has a great deal of anxiety about things and she has a lot of coping strategies and those come out in the books particularly when she's faced with situations where her anxiety spikes but in this case she and her mother are headed off to Greece because her mother has been asked to come and look at something that has been uncovered and while they're there Mary Kate discovers that the local fishing boats are being attacked by their supposedly mythic creature the two-headed hydra and she wants to find out why that's happening and it may or may not have something to do with the commercial fishing plant and the impact on the environment that that has so it was really fun, really enjoyable. This is a really great series that is a blend of contemporary fiction and fantasy. There's enough of the real world in here to make it relatable while there's a bit more fantasy in here as well to make it interesting. So a really great series. I also read The Deadly Daylight by Ash Harrier. This is book one in the Alice England Mystery series. This is about 12 year old Alice who lives with her dad. Her father owns a funeral home and she works there helping him out every now and then and this sort of makes her a bit of a social pariah. People don't really understand her. She also struggles with her social skills and is not at all interested in phones or tv or social media or anything like that. She doesn't really have access to any of it so she's seen as a bit strange but one day at school she ends up meeting Violet and they sort of become acquaintances not quite friends but Violet has a sunlight allergy so she's always covered head to toe in dark clothing to protect her from the sun because she is severely allergic to it and this runs in her family and when her uncle George dies because of his sunlight allergy, Alice becomes intrigued because they obviously run the funeral and she doesn't understand how George who has lived with this his whole life would be so careless as to put himself in a situation where it would kill him and so she enlists Violet's help and they begin investigating his death and they uncover quite a bit going on in their town. This is very much a setup book. It took a little while for me to warm up to Alice as a character because she is so formal and so straight laced and down the line which in its own way is quite charming as well but yeah it took a little while for me to like her character but I'm very intrigued by the world and as I got to know her and her family and sort of why she is the way she is I found this really enjoyable. It's a great mystery series and I have the second book which I'll be reading soon and talking about for another video so stay tuned and then the final book for this recent reads is Ming and Flow Fight for the Future by Jackie French. This is another Australian middle grade series. This is a time-slip novel. We have Ming who lives in the current day. She is at school and she is in a history class and the teacher is just making it dead boring and when she poses a question to him about why aren't we talking about the girls who changed history she gets a very unsatisfactory answer from him very disappointing but she ends up being sent back in time to 1898 Australia where she inhabits the body of Flow who is living on a farm in the middle of nowhere Australia and she rapidly learns that life in this time was incredibly hard for women and when tragedy strikes she ends up needing the help of Flow's aunt, Aunt MacTavish who is a wealthy woman and this looks at racism in early colonised Australia. Ming's family and Flow whose body she inhabits in the past is Australian Chinese and that of course brings with it its own issues and Aunt MacTavish is also Chinese and is highly educated and is fighting for women's rights in Australia particularly around a referendum for increasing women's rights. So this was a really fun interesting story, great look at history. Jackie French always does interesting things with history in her books and this is the first book in a series so there are two more books and I am interested in continuing them at some point and all of them are looking at different times and different ways that girls have impacted history and it's not big, massive, you know, out there events that they have changed the course of history. It's the little moments in the little ways that girls in particular have had an impact and I think that's a really great concept for a series. All right so those are the books that I have read recently in the comments. I'd love to know if you've read any of them or if you are planning on picking any of them up otherwise I'm always interested and on the lookout for new book recommendations so feel free to share any picture books, junior fiction or kids titles that you think I might be interested in. If you want to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a sun emoji down below otherwise I hope that we're on the world just staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching, bye everyone.