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.