Child Education PLUS

Literature-related activities for 4-7s in the November issue:

Baddies strike back! The wolves and trolls in Storyland have had enough of being portrayed as the bad guys. Clare Bevan tells the real fairy tales - lots of ideas for turning the old versions on their heads. As well as the article, there is supporting material to download from the Child Education PLUS website. (The theme is continued in an art project to make a troll's bridge and in the book reviews page which features "ferocious fairytale fiends".)

Halloween. Primary school teacher Amy Arnold describes how she based her Halloween activities on Helen Nicoll's Meg and Mog books and Julia Donaldson's Room on the broom. Her class was excited to learn that Meg and Mog were going to move in with them and so the children needed to build them a house. This stimulated their reading and writing (sending letters to Meg and Mog) and their creativity in designing the house.

Poetry. Brenda Williams starts a series of poetry units for year 1 with Using the senses.

Favourite books. Caroline Sanderson writes about The growing story. Originally written by Ruth Krauss in 1947, this has been brought up to date with illustrations by Helen Oxenbury. It tells the story of a year in the life of one small boy.

Start with a story. Jayne Gould suggests activities based on Julia Donaldson's The magic paintbrush. This helps children learn about China.

All the books mentioned are available in Jordanhill Library.

3 new journals.

The following are now in the library:

Nursery Education PLUS, October 2008. Ideas for working with nursery age children - literature based ones include how to get the most from Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's new book Stick Man, and an article on October's National Year of Reading theme, Word of Mouth. There's also a review section of books on the weather.

Child Education PLUS, October 2008. Similar, but for ages 4-7. Literature-related features are on Lauren Child's Spells and Mick Inkpen's Penguin Small. The book reviews feature Christmas.

Books for Keeps, September 2008. Mick Inkpen features again, as do Anne Cassidy and Peter Dickinson. Julia Jarman writes on translating story into film and Harriet Dombey explains the thinking behind Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. (Harper, 2007). (At Jordanhill, this is shelved at D612.82 WOL). As always, there are several pages of reviews for all ages from pre-school to young adult. And don't forget, Books for Keeps has its own website.

Child Education PLUS

The September 2008 edition of this journal has arrived in the library. It has all sorts of useful ideas for use in the classroom with 4-7s, e.g. this month there are articles on teaching about festivals and rainforests, both popular topics judging by the number of books we lend on them. There are always some articles and reviews relevant to children's literature too. Here, there are reviews of picture books on a food theme, Karen Miller writes about her favourite children's book for this age group, Ronda and David Armitage's Lighthouse Keeper's Picnic, and Jayne Gould suggests using Jackie French's Diary of a wombat as a basis for a cross-curricular topic on animals and Australia. We don't have this in stock, but it looked so good I've ordered it.