 Hi everyone my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher and today I'm here to talk to you about the 2023 pick for the National Simultaneous Storytime event that is taking place on May 24th and is hosted by the Australian Library and Information Association and it is in its 23rd year this year. It's a celebration of Australian picture books. Every year a book is chosen and everyone is encouraged to read it whether you are a school, a library, a preschool, a kinder, if you're homeschooling, if you're just reading it with your children, with the aim of promoting and celebrating reading and literacy. Every year a fantastic book is chosen, it's usually something fun and vibrant and entertaining that's going to hook in readers and particularly for schools a book that often addresses things that come up in our curriculum from Foundation to Year 6. So this year's book is the Speedy Sloth by Rebecca Young and illustrated by Heath McKenzie. It is absolutely gorgeous and a really fun story. The blurb says it was finally time for the event of the year. Spike couldn't believe it. The great race was here. The other sloths said it couldn't be done but Spike didn't care. She was ready to run. So this is Spike. She is a sloth and she is entering into a running race. Her family thinks she's a little bit nuts. Everyone else is very surprised and finds it kind of funny that a sloth is entering a race when she is competing against so many other animals but Spike is determined to be in this race. She's trained for it. She wants to do it and she does. And this is not a book about winning because Spike is a sloth. We're going to be realistic here but winning is not what she is set out to do. She's set out to be part of the race. She's so excited about it. She doesn't let anyone get her down. And that's one of the things I loved about this story was this perseverance and persistence and positivity about setting a goal, aiming for it and achieving it. Her goal was never to win the race and I think that's a really important message to send to kids these days. And I love that we can do it through the vehicle of a story like this. So I've talked about a few other things I loved. I also love Heath McKenzie's illustrations. He has such a fun whimsical illustration style and I love the idea of realistic goal setting and the celebration of achieving the goal that you set, which is what happens in the story. In terms of using it in a classroom it is just a great read aloud. It's fun. There is a lot of rhyming text in here. It would be great for talking about realistic goal setting and also how do you celebrate your goals and what milestones are you going to set for yourself along the way. It's also great for identifying and talking about personal strengths like persistence and not letting people stop you from pursuing a dream that you have and getting students to think about their own personal strengths and their own goals and the things that they want to achieve and whether or not they have anything to do with competing with others or are you just trying to succeed for yourself. Being an early years teacher I'm always looking at picture books with a path with a lens of can I make this into a fun craft activity. Can you just picture all of the amazing sloth craft activities that you could do which would then extend to great writing prompts and reflections on their own experiences and of course this book could be a precursor to having class races and celebrating the achievements of each and every student no matter where they place. So I will leave links for more information about this book as well as National Simultaneous Storytime down below. I had a lot of fun reading this and I'm looking forward to all of the classes in my school reading this on the 24th of May. If you've read this book and you want to chat to me about it feel free to do so down below otherwise feel free to share any other picture books that you have that have a really great theme of persistence and realistic goals and if you just want to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a sloth emoji down below. I hope that wherever you're in the world you're staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.