We selected Iceberg as our winning book after a lot of hard work discussing the merits of Iceberg and Just One Bee.

It was fun, interesting and challenging and a lot harder work than we thought it would be to choose the best book.  

We selected Iceberg because the illustrations were really good to look at and the theme was easy to understand. It was educating children in an easy way to understand, the importance of caring for the environment. We did a diorama to show  how we saw the book in our minds and we focused on this for our creative response as it was our winning book. 

Just one bee we chose to do a diagram of the life cycle of the pumpkin to highlight the impact of no bees on our food supply.  We like the message about the importance of bees and that if we didn’t have them we wouldn’t have a lot of food.

We wrote a poem about Stellarphant to show resilience when there are barriers to achieving our goals.  It was a great book to read because it is inspiring young children to follow their dreams.

Blue Flower was a challenging theme that needed looking at closely to see that it was about it being ok to be different.  We painted a yellow background and made paper flowers that we glued on to the yellow paper.

The Boy and the Elephant was challenging to score and rate as it didn’t have words so we couldn’t rate the conventions of writing and the style of writing.  It was engaging even though it didn’t have words.  We found it at times confusing to understand without words to support the text.  We drew a picture like Freya Blackwood’s as we worked at drawing one thing trees and being able to see something else in it, the elephant.

The Inheritance was hard for us to understand and judge because it was written for older readers and our first response was to think that it wasn’t appropriate as a picture book until we considered that the picture book category is for children aged 0 to 18 years.  We found the illustrations disturbing and confronting.  It did have a strong message about the environment and we could tell the author was passionate about the environment.  Because of the strong messages about the environment we made a poster to highlight things we can do for the environment.