Friday Thoughts - Book Week

It has been one of my favourite weeks of the whole year - Book Week. It has been a week of delving into books that have been shortlisted for awards by the Australian Book Council and there have been a number of interesting and fun books to read this year. Perfect to promote reading in young children! The children that I work with have enjoyed the stories, but it is also a great opportunity to teach and highlight literacy features. Here are just a few ideas that we looked at that you could use with any book with your child:

• Firstly, teaching the enjoyment in reading. I enjoy using different voices for the different characters in the story. How you use your voice is important in story reading - quieten your voice for sombre moments in the story or when there are moments of suspense, then read more quickly and loudly when there are moments of action or excitement in the story. Don't be afraid to pause to add emphasis to a suspense-filled moment. It makes the story so much more interesting.
• Model what you 'do' when you read by 'thinking aloud'. Read the title of the story and look at the front cover and chat about what you think that the story could be about (eg. 'Hmm, the title of the story is "Come down, Cat" and I can see a picture of a cat and a boy up on a high place. Maybe this is a story about a cat being stuck somewhere. I wonder why the cat is up so high?, etc). Talk about how you work out words and what is happening in the story (eg. {everywhere} "Wow, this word looks a bit tricky. I could try to look for little words in this big word. I can see the word 'every' and I can see the word 'where'. This word could be 'everywhere'. Maybe I will try that word in the sentence to see if it makes sense...").
• We looked at what an 'illustrator' does. We read the book 'Run Away Hug' by Nick Bland - a book that 'Freya Blackwood' has illustrated. We attempted her style of illustrating, by drawing pictures with lots of lines.
• We focused on the similies in 'That's not a daffodil' by Elizabeth Honey. We made up our own daffodils and wrote what they looked like (eg. My daffodil looks like a ...).
• We looked at alliteration - a series of words starting with the same sound - in 'For all creatures' by Rebecca Cool and Glenda Millard. We wrote a short list of things that start with the same sound and used them as a basis in a simple thank you prayer.

I hope that these ideas encourage you to delve into a book this weekend :)