Jon Klassen 2013 Caldecott Winner

Hats off to award-winning illustrator for latest yarns

Tuesday, 26 March, 2013

Annie Holife@scmp.com

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 is also about a search for a lost hat. This story of a little fish that has stolen a hat from a big fish is not a sequel but has a similar premise.
The main difference between the books is the shift in perspective, and change in our sympathies. In the new story, we see the little fish’s point of view as the thief, and in the first book, we see the bear’s point of view as the victim of theft.

This Is Not My Hat is a perfect example of illustrations amplifying the text. In one sequence, the same drawing of a fish fills four consecutive double pages, with the only difference being the change in the fish’s eyes from closed to open to looking up, and finally to narrow slits. When these illustrations are set against the narration by the protagonist, the thieving little fish, the impact is noticeable. The colours are subtle and muted against a black background, the fish in This Is Not My Hat is reminiscent of Leo Lionni’s  colourful Swimmy.

A  Canadian living in Los Angeles,  Klassen has an established career in animation. He created a  trailer for This Is Not My Hat, and was the illustrator behind U2’s animated music video for their song I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight   as well as a promotion for the BBC’s coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Klassen creates superb works of art as an illustrator, and he continues to collaborate on  other people’s stories. The wide range of his talent can be witnessed in two new releases – House Held Up by Trees   by Ted Kooser,  a former United States poet laureate,  and   The Dark by the prince of twisted humour,  Lemony Snicket.

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicate to improving children’s literacy by reading aloud to them (bringmeabook.org.hk)

Andy Warhol by Mike Venezia - Hong Kong Museum of Art Exhibition

Warhol exhibition a lesson in materialism

Tuesday, 19 March, 2013

Annie Holife@scmp.com

My original plan was to write about taking my children and their friends to see the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. But this was foiled as I could not organise an outing until the Easter break, which would be just a few days before it closes at the end of the month.

I attended a private guided tour and will highlight parts of the exhibition that I think are noteworthy for children.

Presented chronologically, which is easy for children to understand, the exhibition begins with photos of a young Warhol, who was often confined to his bed with bouts of a nervous system illness. During these times, he would draw, listen to the radio and collect photos of movie stars such as the autographed photo of Shirley Temple addressed to Andrew Warhola (the artist's birth name) that is exhibited.

"Warhol created a series of paintings for children using vintage children's toys."

The first gallery contains Warhol's early works as a successful commercial illustrator in the 1950s. He was very close to his mother, and even involved her in the art he created by asking her to write text in her feminine calligraphy directly onto his paintings. Visitors can look for grammatical errors in some of the text because Warhol's mother, an immigrant from what is now Slovakia, was not a native English speaker.

Warhol's work was informed by his fascination with celebrity and materialism. He was unafraid to copy and replicate everyday American consumer goods, and present them as works of art. Even in his early commercial work, we see the theme of repetition.

His passion for repetition was so mechanical that he dubbed his art studio The Factory. The exhibition includes a replica of a silver-walled room in which we may wander around and see photos of Warhol and his collaborators at work. This part of the gallery also includes the Silver Clouds art installation in which silver cloud-shaped balloons float freely about a glass-walled room, ready for visitors to play in. The second gallery shows works from the last two decades of Warhol's life. It was during this time that socialites and celebrities commissioned him to recreate their image with his signature pops of colour on the eyelids or lips.

Again, Warhol showed a willingness to share art experiences by collaborating on paintings with younger artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat. The only outrightly subversive works on exhibition are the abstract Rorschach-like images that he and his friends created by urinating on chemicals to produce various chemical reactions. Even so, I think children will enjoy learning about the oxidation process.

The final part of the gallery showcases Warhol's Time Capsule and Children's Gallery art projects. In the first, Warhol would place correspondence, magazines and souvenirs from his travels into a cardboard box, and when that box became full, he would seal it up, date or title it and start on the next box. At the exhibition are mementos from his visit to Hong Kong, including notes written in the '70s on Mandarin Oriental stationery and postcards of the then Hong Kong skyline.

Warhol created a series of paintings for children using vintage children's toys. The Children's Gallery is exhibited in the same way that it was originally showcased in 1983, with the paintings hung low so that they are at eye-level with the young audience for whom they are intended.

For further reading on this iconic artist, I recommend Mike Venezia's Andy Warhol from his "Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists" series of titles. This picture book is sensitive to its school-aged readers by providing an interesting and comprehensive introduction to Warhol and his art while omitting some of the more controversial aspects of his life.

"Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal" exhibition runs from 10am to 8pm daily, to Mar 31

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them bringmeabook.org.hk

Goodnight iPad - It's A Book - Dr Larry Rosen

Pick up a good book and power down in peace

Tuesday, 12 March, 2013

Annie Holife@scmp.com

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 phone use. However, while the students in the group who had their phones waited patiently, those in the second group began to exhibit symptoms of anxiety. The phoneless students were restless, tense and apprehensive. A term has been coined for those who exhibit this kind of stress - "nomophobia", the fear of being out of mobile phone contact and missing out ("nomo" meaning "no mobile").

Rosen's talk helped me to reflect on my own bad habits. I became more aware of my task-switching tendencies as well as my need to get connected as soon as I have a free minute.

One day, as my two daughters were role playing, I overheard the older one tell her sister: "OK, this time I'm the baby and you are the mummy." So, my younger daughter climbed onto my chair and started tapping the keys on my computer. Her actions underscored my need to wean myself from the digital world and be more connected with my real world. So, I've started by staying offline and enjoying the view when I'm travelling by car, and turning off my e-mail application when I'm writing this column.

If you also have mild nomophobia, you might enjoy two picture books. Lane Smith's It's a Book is a tongue-in-cheek look at a donkey's attempts to understand what a book is. "How do you scroll down?" and "Where's your mouse?" are just two of his many questions, to which the book-reading monkey patiently and repeatedly answers: "It's a book."

Readers familiar with Margaret Wise Brown's classic book Goodnight Moon will laugh out loud at Goodnight iPad, a parody written by - get this - Ann Droyd. Every buzzword in our brave new world is cleverly worked into this rhyme, which looks and reads like the original.

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them bringmeabook.org.hk

Dr Larry Rosen - Technology and Families

Between the lines

Tuesday, 05 March, 2013, 12:00am

Annie Ho
life@scmp.com

I remember those halcyon days when Douglas Coupland's book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture put me squarely into his demographic of cool, philosophical hipsters. I am a member of the first generation to grow up with digital technologies like personal computers and mobile phones, which makes me relatively proficient with technology. Yet I am still hesitant about buying an iPad or a Kindle. I would feel differently about embracing new gadgets (and I probably wouldn't call them gadgets in the first place) if I belonged to Generation C.

Generation C is the term used by Dr Larry Rosen to refer to the connected generation of young people born since 1995. Rosen, a professor and research psychologist at California State University, came to Hong Kong recently to share his findings from 25 years of researching the "psychology of technology".

Rosen's talk was littered with fun facts that made the audience gasp and guffaw in recognition of the widening generation gap. One of his studies showed that 42 per cent of teenagers can type a text message blindfolded, which is no surprise considering the other statistic that teenagers send and receive hundreds of text messages every day.

Some teenagers in his studies also claim to be able to do up to seven things at one time, while the majority of them are often doing four things at one time: listening to music, using the computer, texting and studying. I suspect that by "studying" with so many distractions, they are merely referring to the physical proximity of an open textbook.

Parents and educators generally accept that today's technologies give children better tools with which to learn. Each successive generation learns to multitask with greater efficiency. On the days that I am able to clear my list of things to do, I attribute that to my multitasking skills. Shouldn't parents encourage children to develop these same skills to become more productive?

we are indeed more productive when we multitask, but what most of us are doing is merely task-switching.

Rosen's answer to this is thought-provoking: we are indeed more productive when we multitask, but what most of us are doing is merely task-switching.

True multitasking involves accomplishing automatic tasks at the same time, such as talking and driving, or walking and chewing gum. What children and adults today are doing (too much of) is going off-task in a pattern of continuous partial attention.

Task-switchers don't do as well in school, but this correlation with concentration seems obvious to us. Less obvious is Rosen's finding that task-switching teens have sleep deficit and sleep disruption. Most teenagers sleep less than the minimum eight hours needed for optimal growth. Many are connected to technology up to just before they go to bed. And a significant number of them stay connected through the night - waking up to read and reply to text messages.

Rosen asserts that a healthy brain needs sleep, calmness, time away from technology, and time for creative thinking. By making sure children have the tools for healthy brain development, parents help them to develop communication skills and appreciate downtime.

Here are Rosen's four rules for connected children:

Don't post to social media or text friends anything you wouldn't want your grandmother to read or see.

Wait and consider your content before you hit "send" or "post".

Have regular family discussions where there are no technology devices nearby.

Limit technology use to the living room or other communal areas, and take 10 minute breaks for every hour of use.

These rules are also useful for mothers who document their daily life on Facebook and fathers who are constantly on their BlackBerry.

(For more on this subject, check in with this column next week, and also see Rosen's book Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation.)

March 6 is World Read Aloud Day. Bring Me A Book ambassador Winnie Young and I will be reading aloud to children at a community centre in Shek Kip Mei.

You can also celebrate by organising a reading event at your child's school, or simply read with your children at home, and get connected by sharing your reading photo or book title via social media.

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicate to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them bringmeabook.org.hk

This article first appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition on Mar 05, 2013 as How to survive in an over-connected world