General Literacy Support - Information Skills

The activity suggestions provided are designed to encourage children and students of all ages to be come actively involved in reading, writing and illustrating.

Use these as a starting point to stimulate your own ideas for working with the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards finalists in the classroom, in the library or at home.

General Activities

• Arrange a visit to the local library. Take part in the New Zealand Post Book Awards activities being organised at your library.
• Write a communal story or short passage using the overhead projector, editing and correcting as you go.
• Pull a book apart - figuratively! Discuss the purpose of the ISBN, the index, table of contents, paperback versus hardcover...
• Look at non-fiction books. How do they differ from fiction titles? What contents will you typically find in a non-fiction book?
• Explore the ways your school or local library is organised. Think of five favourite books and work out where they should be shelved in the library.
• Take three paragraphs from a favourite book and re-write these in a different way (eg. in first person, in a more/less descriptive style, using simpler words, in a pupil's words).
• Discuss why different pupils choose different books - by the cover, a known author, the blurb, the last page...
• Look at the way books are catalogued in the library. Discuss the advantages of a computerised catalogue.
• Have pupils keep a record for a week of everything they read - bus timetables, food wrappers, books, TV guides, letters, internet pages. Discuss the importance of reading and comprehension.
• Invite your local librarian or historian to give a talk on the history of writing - how it developed out of an oral history tradition and where it belongs in an electronic age.
• Invite a publisher to talk about how a book is made - from writing and illustrating, through to design, production and distribution.
• Invite your local PostShop or Mail Centre manager to visit and discuss the ways information is circulated (eg. post, courier, e-mail) and the ways these have changed. Study the journey of a letter. Organise a visit to a local sorting office or mail centre.

Early Childhood

• StartMake a game of identifying characters in favourite books.
• Visit the local library to find books about a special topic.
• Find a particular book on the bookshelves of the library.
• a "sharing books with home" scheme.

Primary & Intermediate

• Play 'Consequences' with the starting phrase "I went to the bookshop to buy a book..."
• Start a class lending library - let the pupils take home books to read with their parents. Have them choose a title to take home and explain their choice.
• Have the class design and carry out a reading survey among the pupils of another class. Pool the information and see what can be established about reading patterns.
• Match authors with titles. Write blurbs for a range of one author's titles.
• Look at character names from books. Discuss why authors may have chosen them.
• Compare short story, poem and novel writing styles.

Secondary

• Analyse a passage from a finalist title. Look at style, grammar, imagery.
• Organise a debate on a controversial book - those who love it defending it against those who hate it.
• Debate the importance of reading as a life-skill.
• Plan a five minute video using a scene from a book. Choose one angle, decide what is incidental to the plot, what is essential. Draw up a storyboard and write the screenplay, trying to stay true to the style the author intended.
• Research an author on-line looking for information about background, genre, and advice for new writers (publisher's websites are often a good place to start).