Global Book Week

Literacy offers an excellent focus for a global week. Stories and poems are a great stimulus material to encourage children to discuss citizenship and global issues.

Diversity

Books can be used to learn about the everyday lives of children in other countries. Similarities and differences can be explored. Children can be encouraged to empathise with others’ situations through drama or writing stories or poems. Storytellers could be invited in to share stories from other cultures.

Sustainable development

Many sustainable development issues are addressed in stories. This can be a good way into thinking about quite difficult concepts such as global warming.

Social justice

"It’s not fair" readily trips off many children’s tongues. This area is very much linked to ‘rights’ and is well served by reading material, photos etc.

Interdependence

Children can begin to empathise through stories that we are all interdependent. Through books they can explore commodities, historical connections and present day interdependence through food, tourism, music etc.

Suggestions

Bring a storyteller or performance poet into school, if possible someone from another culture. Your local Development Education Centre may have lists of people to invite (see contact list at the end of this booklet.)

Encourage the children to tell stories orally.
Use freeze frame or hot seating or Post-it notes to put them in a story.
Create and use story sacks.
Arrange for a puppeteer to come into the school.
Let children work in groups to create puppets to retell stories (e.g. Anansi tales).
Use a world map to track where books have come from, or their settings.
Borrow or buy some dual-language books (see below) and learn to greet each other in different languages.
Each class could focus on a book or books from a certain area and research that place.
The focus of the week could be narrowed to, for example, books about and from Africa, books about ‘Moving’ (refugees), ‘Food’ or ‘Sustainable Development’.
Curriculum areas other than literacy could be brought in, eg geography, music, art, maths, citizenship, science.