Winners! Red Dot Books & Readers Cup 2015-2016

Another cycle of the Red Dot Book Awards and the Readers Cup competition is over.  This is our 7th year!

With over 5,000 votes cast from 11 different international schools, the Singapore-wide book award 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in the four categories are:

Early Years

• 1st place:  Polar Bear's Underwear
  
• 2nd place:  Pig the Pug
  
• 3rd place:  You Are (Not) Small
  

Younger Readers

• 1st place:  Pigsticks and Harold and the Incredible Journey
  
• 2nd place:  Quinny and Hopper
  
• 3rd place:  Samurai vs. Ninja: The Battle for the Golden Egg
  

Older Readers

• 1st place:  Wild Boy
  
• 2nd place:  Masterminds
  
• 3rd place:  The Fastest Boy in the World

Mature Readers

• 1st place:  The Martian
  
• 2nd place:  The Truth Commission
• 3rd place:  A Time to Dance

Note that each school also has its own winners -- and participating schools are given those results to advertise as they will.

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Last Thursday the Canadian International School - Lakeside hosted the Readers Cup competition, where teams from different schools compete in three categories -- Younger, Older, and Mature -- with questions based on a subset of this year's Red Dot books.

The Readers Cup winners were:

• Younger:
• 1st - Dulwich Team 2
• 2nd - NPS Team 1
• 3rd - SAS Team 1
• Older 
• 1st - CIS TK 1
• 2nd - SAS 1
• 3rd - CIS Lakeside 2
•  Mature:
• 1st - GESS
• 2nd - UWCSEA Dover
• 3rd - CIS Lakeside

Students could also submit book cover creations and book trailers to be judged.  Click here to see all the entries.

The Book Cover winners were:

• Younger Readers - Dulwich : Senan Lynch
• Older Readers - Lycee Francais : Antoine Mauger
• Mature Readers - SAS : Sneha Mukherjee

The Book Trailer winners were:

• Younger Readers - Nexus : Isla & Oliver
• Older Readers - SAS : Sidney Ford
• Mature Readers - SAIS : Aditya Rao

254 students from 14 schools in 46 teams participated in the Readers Cup.  Congratulations to all! And many thanks to all our members who organized it.

Besides medals and trophies, individual prizes included a year's subscription to Epic Books, an online ebook library for children, as well as (physical) book tokens from A Closet Full of Books, the children's literature specialist book vendor here in Singapore run by Denise Tan, who attended the competition and handed out the prizes. 

Books worth $3k are also donated to charity in honor of each of the three 1st place teams in the book quiz.  The three winning teams will be notified early next year as to which local charity their $1000 worth of books from A Closetful of Books has been donated to and they will be given the opportunity for a photo session with the recipients.

Feedback on some professional visits in Perth

Last week Barb Reid and I did a fairly impromptu 3-day visit to Perth, thanks to Scoot fares too cheap to ignore, some end-of-year extra money, and the hunt for a keynote speaker.

We are hosting the next Librarians' Knowledge Sharing Workshop here on the UWCSEA East campus in February 2017 (you can register your interest here - https://www.uwcsea.edu.sg/centre/librarian-17) and wanted to approach Brad Tyrrell at Scotch College in Perth as a possible keynote and pre-conference workshop leader on Libguides.  (The answer is Yes -- he is going to be one of our featured speakers, with Dianne McKenzie the other.)

The trip was a perfect chance to also visit some libraries, which Brad helped arrange.  We ended up seeing 7 school libraries, 2 public libraries, 1 university library, and 1 literature centre.

I'll start by sharing my photos -- and Barb has more.  We'll each summarize our big take-aways later, e.g., I'm working on a Storify of the highlights and interest points for me (though what I chose to photograph is a big clue).  [Update: May 27: I opted to just annotate the photos in Google Photos - a pseudo-Storify feature.] [Update: May 30: Fixed the "shed" link below.]

• Scotch College
• HS Library
• PS/MS Library
• Teaching spaces
• Brad's "Shed" -- i.e., the "stacks" area for his HS Library
• Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC)
• Wesley College
• Penrhos College
• Iona Presentation College
• Shenton College
• International School of Western Australia
• Curtin University
• The Grove public library
• The City of Perth public library - Hay St.
• The Fremantle Literature Centre

Happy viewing!

[Update: May 28]  Here we are with Jenny Doust (whom we met at the last Librarians' Knowledge Sharing Workshop -- in KL) at the Fremantle Literature Centre.