專欄 – 南華早報 (9 Apr, 2013)
We are excited to be invited as a judge and charity beneficiary for the 2013 HK Young Writers Award, to be announced next Wed 17 April. Read Annie’s latest column explaining why reading is so important to becoming a great writer 相關專欄 Annie Ho’s Weekly Column
愛閱讀．愛學習講座及工作坊
We are organizing a series of talks and workshops as part of our “Love to Learn” campaign to promote children’s critical, creative and innovating thinking while minimizing anxiety and stress related to academic performance. We hope to see you at one of events soon! http://www.eventbrite.hk/org/3620381505
專欄 – 南華早報 (25 March, 2013)
Winning one Caldecott award is reason enough to celebrate, but this year Jon Klassen took home two. His book This Is Not My Hat won the Caldecott Medal, the most prestigious US children’s book award given to illustrators, but he also won a Caldecott Honour – sort of a runner-up award – for illustrating Mac Barnett’s Extra Yarn. In Extra Yarn, a little girl in a drab, grey town finds a box of multicoloured yarn and begins to knit herself a sweater. She has some extra yarn, and each time she knits something for the people, animals and objects around her, she finds she has extra yarn. The heart-warming story is well-complemented by Klassen’s illustrations, rendered in sombre monochromes with injections of colour and no background detail. Readers familiar with his style will even recognise that some animal characters that wear sweaters knitted by the little girl are similar to those in I Want My Hat Back, the first book that Klassen wrote and illustrated. What’s unusual about Klassen is that, one year after publishing this best-selling book, he has created another book, the award-winning This Is Not My Hat, that
專欄 – 南華早報 (12 March, 2013)
Larry Rosen, a professor and research psychologist at California State University, came to Hong Kong recently to talk about the impact of digital technologies on Generation C, the connected generation of young people born since 1995. As he shared the findings from his studies, many of his observations reverberated with me and my peers. I can relate to the negative effects of continually going off the task at hand each time I hear a “ding”. Until Rosen’s talk, I considered myself to be multitasking. In fact, I was task-switching and being rather unproductive. In one study, Rosen put two groups of teenagers in separate rooms. Both groups were asked to stay there while waiting to go to another area to participate in a study. In fact, the study was observing the two groups while they waited. Both groups were told that mobile phone use in the rooms was prohibited. The first group was permitted to keep their phones with them, and the second group was asked to leave their phones at the door. After 15 minutes, the research team observed that both groups followed instructions and did not engage in any phon
專欄 – 南華早報 (24 February, 2013)
You may not know Deirdre McDermott, but you will know Where’s Wally?, Hooray for Fish!,Owl Babies, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!. Although McDermott didn’t write or illustrate any of these books, she and her colleagues at Walker Books have been instrumental in creating these and many other well-loved books for more than 30 years. A quick scan of the title pages of picture books in our home revealed that many are published by Walker Books, the leading independent publisher of children’s books in Britain, or Candlewick Press, its equally successful sister company in the United States. The extensive stable of artists includes the wonderful Mo Willems, timeless illustrator Helen Oxenbury, latest sensation Jon Klassen and teen fiction writer Anthony Horowitz. I didn’t appreciate the role of publishers in the creation of a picture book until I attended a forum on the subject at the Taipei International Book Exhibition. McDermott spoke, along with a French book publisher and literary agents from Turkey and Spain. Children’s books are works of art, so I had always imagined writers and illustrators together
