Yet again, I love the CBCA’s theme for this year’S Book Week. ‘Escape to Everywhere’ encourages creativity, imagination and travelling from the comfort of your armchair.

Now, you can’t travel without a passport, can you? So, make sure your children are prepared with a passport in hand, ready to jump into the pages of the books they read during Book Week 2017.

I apologise that I don’t have a printable for you this year. We are in the midst of a move. Most of our belongings are packed away in storage boxes and computers and printers are out of order. You’ll notice that our own Book Week 2017 passports are a little makeshift. In all honesty, kids don’t mind though, especially because they’ll love creating their own passports.

What you need:

• A4 paper
• Coloured paper or card stock (or coloured manila folders)
• Scissors
• Staples
• Drawing and writing materials
• Stamp and inkpad
• Lots of books to read

How to create your Book Week Passport:

1. Fold your white A4 paper in half horizontally and vertically

2. Cut the folds to create a mini booklet

3. Cut the coloured paper/cardstock to create a cover for your booklet

4. Place the white paper pages inside the coloured cover and staple in place

5. Add a title and decorate the cover of your passport

6. Write prompts on each of the inside pages of your passport

• Title:
• Author:
• Illustrator:
• Destination:
• Form of transport:
• Travel notes:
• Plus leave a place for a visual note (illustration)

7. Escape to Everywhere by reading as many books as you can throughout Book Week and record your thoughts about your books and travels on the pages of your passport ( e.g. What you saw, what you learned, your favourite part etc.)

8. Have Mum, Dad or your teacher stamp each page of your passport to validate each of your bookish travels.

Going further:

a) Be inspired by Crichton Award winning book, The Patchwork Bike, and create your own form of transport from recycled or unused items from around your home. Get cosy inside your ‘patchwork’ vehicle to help you travel through the pages of the books you read.

b) Create your own escape space within your home or classroom, somewhere you can hide away and read.

Usually we go to a great deal of effort to prepare our Advent Calendar each year. Sadly, we’ve been so incredibly busy this term that December has crept up on us.

As books have always played an important role in our countdown to Christmas (check out our past calendars here), Cammy was literally begging me to unpack our Christmas books last night.  I realised then that we had run out of time to wrap our Christmas books for this year.  So under immense pressure to pull something together in a day, I decided to combine our love of Christmas books and scavenger hunts to create our Christmas Reading Advent Calendar for 2016.

I’ve created a collection of 24 Christmas book scavenger hunt prompts, each encouraging children to search their collection of Christmas books to find books with particular themes, characters, settings, messages or features.

How to use the cards:

a) Simply print and cut the cards; Place them in a box, jar or basket; Then randomly select a card each day of Advent to help you choose which book to read each day in the lead-up to Christmas.

OR

b) Print and cut the cards; Place each card inside a numbered envelope (ranging from 1-24); Attach and display the envelopes along a piece of string; Then open the relevant envelope each day to reveal a card and book prompt for each day of Advent (you could pop a little treat inside each envelope too, but it’s not necessary).

Below is a ‘work in progress’ image of our Christmas Reading Advent Calendar, which we’ve begun to set up above our fireplace this year.

IF YOU LOVE THIS IDEA, CHECK OUT OUR WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF BOOKISH CHRISTMAS IDEAS.

How to use:

There are no rules to the game. You can use the free printable in any way that you like. For example:

• Ask children to find books based on the prompts given, and write the titles on the Book Scavenger Hunt sheet.

• Arm pre-writers with a camera and ask them to take photos of book covers they find with your help.

• Use a stopwatch to time how long it takes for children to complete the Book Scavenger Hunt.

• Ask children to create their own book scavenger hunt.

HAVE A GREAT BOOK WEEK 2016

In past years we have sent books to friends, continued a perpetual book and donated books to the Ronald McDonald House in Melbourne.

This year we wanted to try something different. Inspired by the Free Little Library in our local area we wanted to anonymously drop books for strangers to find and read. So we set about organising our own book-drop.

We created parcels of books, wrapping them in plastic to protect them from Melbourne’s torrential downpour.

Attached to our parcels were instructions, which we wrote onto little heart shaped post-it notes (it was Valentine’s Day after all). We also included official bookmarks and bookplates, which we downloaded from the IBGD website.

After filling our car boot with the books, we set about our day, leaving behind us a trail of books.
We left books in local playgrounds

…on park benches and malls (Cammy quite enjoyed trying to go unnoticed by members of the public)

…and at bus stops, cafes and shopping centres.

We were excited to take part in International Book Giving Day and loved the nature of our choice of giving. However, we didn’t quite expect the thrill and anticipation that we encountered. On our route back home from lunch at a local cafe, we drove past a bus stop and noticed that the books we had left there had been taken. It planted a seed of curiosity and we began to re-trace our steps in search of answers. We wanted to know if our books were being claimed by new owners, and we were excited when we discovered that some had.

Funnily enough, we discovered that some of the books had been handed to a shopping centre cleaner as lost property and realised that our notes could have been a little more direct; Though it was also heartening to realise that there are many good people in the world who have no desire to take what isn’t theirs.

If you’re looking for a way to take part in International Book Giving Day in 2016, we highly recommend a Book-Drop, but there’s nothing stopping you from dropping some books tomorrow.

Who doesn’t love a good scavenger hunt? Hunting for books can be a fun family or classroom activity.

Last year, I ran a book-a-day challenge with my readers on Instagram. It was a great success, and mums and dads loved being reacquainted with favourite books that had somehow become forgotten as their little family library grew.

With Book Week around the corner, and the Children’s Book Council of Australia encouraging children to CONNECT TO READING, I thought it was time to make a kid-friendly version of this game  that parents, teachers and librarians can print and use in a flash.

How to play:

There are no rules to the game. You can use the free printables in anyway that you like. For example:

Download and print:

There are two book scavenger hunts for you to enjoy. Click on the images below to download and print them.

Check out other ways to play with books:

Like this post? Stay connected:

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What are ‘Sight Words‘ or ‘High Frequency Words’?

Even if your child hasn’t begun bringing home ‘sight‘ or ‘high frequency’ words, it is likely that you have already seen or heard about them. As the names suggest, these English words are the most commonly occurring words in everyday texts (accounting for more than 50% of the words we read in a text). Children are often encouraged to learn these particular words as a whole by sight or memory; mainly because the words are seen so regularly in texts and will assist in reading fluency and comprehension, but also because some of the words are more difficult to decode due to their uncommon spelling patterns.

Using ‘sight words‘ or ‘high frequency words‘ in a play-based setting

Cammy is now five and is currently attending pre-school. We have chosen not to explicitly teach her how to read before school through rote learning or structured reading programs, but we are conscious in providing experiences that build literacy foundations through play and exposure to language. We do a lot of reading, we play games with letters and sounds and I’ve recently begun to use words as props in her play.

You may remember that my hard drive crashed last year. I didn’t get a chance to throw it out before the kids took ownership of it. They love to tap away at it, writing stories and sending emails. so I decided to make use of it in a recent invitation to play.

I set up a simple office play space (e.g. pens, stapler, calculator etc.) at our writing station, opening the laptop and leaning a list of ‘high frequency words’ against the screen.

Although the idea of ‘sight words’ is to learn them by memory, I am hoping that Cammy will recognise spelling patterns within the words so I rearranged some of the words to create simple lists for Cammy. I tried to:

• Start with words consisting of two sounds.

• Group words that had similar sounds (first sound or last sound)

• Also, Cammy’s experience of letters is with lowercase, but the laptop presents uppercase letters, which is why I presented the list in both formats. You can simply provide the words in one format if it seems too overwhelming for your child.

This was simply an invitation for her to play with the words. There weren’t any instructions or expectations from me.

Cammy did choose to look for the letters on the laptop. Our laptop is dead, and I think this is a great thing for the purpose of this play. Cammy can’t see what she is typing. She can’t see if she’s made any errors. She can’t print out the words and ask me to correct them.  She doesn’t feel any anxiety or pressure to learn words. NONE OF THIS ACTUALLY MATTERS at this point!

What matters is that she is seeing the words, deciphering letters, looking for patterns in the words and all while she is playing.

Try it yourself: There are many lists that have been compiled (e.g. Dolch, Fry, Magic 100 Words) if you wanted to try this yourself, but you will be able to find a list easily by using the terms ‘sight words list’ or ‘high frequency words’ in an online search.

FURTHER IDEAS FOR USING SIGHT WORDS

Follow the following Pinterest boards for more sight word activities or to prepare your child for learning to read:

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