Shahnee is a primary school teacher who has a passion for supporting children to develop core literary and numeracy skills. She believes in creating a love for learning and fostering children's inquisitive, creative nature. She loves open ended play and believes it brings out everyone's inner child.
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Parents get ready, Book Week is approaching! It’s that magical time of year where you will see children dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood, Where’s Wally and Harry Potter at their school parade to celebrate their favourite books and cherished characters. This annual, week-long celebration simply brings literature to life – helping to foster a love of reading and highlighting the important benefits for children.
The joy of reading doesn’t have to stop once the story is finished. You can inspire children to engage even further with their favourite books by adding narratives to their play. Here’s some fun activities you can do to encourage a love of reading using CONNETIX:
Create a Scene or Backdrop for a Puppet Show
Using your CONNETIX, build a scene from your story. You might build a 2D or 3D city, an amusement park, a castle or even a garden. You can press flowers and leaves between the clear tiles to give your setting a more natural, realistic feel. Now, create some puppets and act out the prequel or sequel to your favourite book, or even retell the events.
Build Characters
Make sure you’ve got some room for this one! Write down all the important things from your favourite book, it might be the types of characters and their names, the settings or places they visited, and so on.
To create a word search you first need to make a grid with your tiles. Write down the words you brainstormed onto the tiles, one letter per tile. You might make the words go vertically, horizontally, diagonally or even backwards. Add the word list to the bottom for your child to solve.
Using your CONNETIX, create a list of recommended reading for your friends, family or classmates. If you’d like to organise them by genre, add a heading to the top of the list and help your child to sort them accordingly.
photo from @three.wildlings.and.me
Whether you’re creating new characters for a story or reflecting on the characters in your favourite books, draw a range of character’s heads, bodies and legs on a new tile. Then, simply mix and match the tiles to create new characters.
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You can use your CONNETIX to create the characters from your text. They could be anything from a dragon, to an elephant or even a robot! You can add your story-inspired designs to the CONNETIX car bases to boost interactivity and get your characters moving. Alternatively, you could build a character for your own story. You might like to write a character description for them including their personality traits and details describing their physical appearance.
Ever wondered how author’s plan and start their own text? Try writing your own comic or sequel to your favourite story by creating a CONNETIX storyboard. Grab out the largest tiles that you have and your chalk markers, then draw a picture to explain what happens during each part of the story. You might even like to add some speech bubbles too!
Grab out five tiles and write the titles ‘character’, ‘bad guy’, ‘setting’, ‘problem’ and ‘solution’. Now write or draw six matching ideas under each of the headings. For example, ogre, wizard, cave, the sun disappeared or three wishes. Next, roll a dice five times. The number that comes up on the first roll is your character, whichever number comes up on the second roll is the bad guy, and so on. Now that you have the characters, setting and elements of your story you can begin writing!
Here’s a fun game to get your child thinking about the titles of some of their favourite books. Take a few tiles and draw some of the most important parts of the story on them. You might even draw a picture that represents each word from the title of the book. Then present these to your child and see if they can work out the book.
Using your brainstormed words, create each of them by writing one letter on each tile and laying them out together so you can see each word. Now, create the crossword and overlap some of the letters where two of the words share the same letter. Below your crossword write a clue to help your child guess the word. Don’t forget to add numbers to each tile that correspond to the clue, so they know where the words will go. Take a picture so you don’t forget where each word goes, then rub off your writing and give the clues to your child to solve.
Using your CONNETIX, create the scene or characters who will be involved in your story. Allow your child to become immersed in play and once they’re done revisit together what happened. Help them to write this out in a short planner. When they’re ready they can write out the story by adding all the details they included in their playtime.
Create a boardgame in any shape or design you like by arranging your CONNETIX. You might like to add some novelty spaces where players can move forward or backwards extra spaces if they land on certain tiles. Create a list of questions about your favourite book and place them next to your game. Grab some friends, a dice , some tokens, and play away.
Lay out your tiles in a grid, then create a map showing all the places mentioned in your text. If playing together, children can compare their map with a friend – did they envision the map to be the same? Or they can relive the story by creating puppets of their characters and walking them back through the places they visited.
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Make a list of different fiction and non-fiction themes and genres. Place them on a whiteboard or fridge, and have children find a different book for each category you’ve listed. Have fun reading them together!
Here’s some idea’s to get you started: mystery, fantasy, love, a book with a secret message, a book about magic, something that grows, something you haven’t read, a classic, a book that makes you happy, a book about a different country or culture, a book about a celebration or science fiction.
‘The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
Dr Suess
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