Mary, our Little Scientists Quality Assessor, reads the delightfully appealing Alpacas with Maracas as part of National Simultaneous Storytime 2019.
Mary, our Little Scientists Quality Assessor, reads the delightfully appealing Alpacas with Maracas as part of National Simultaneous Storytime 2019.
On the election weekend, we would like to hear from the children: What world do they want to live in? What would happen if they were in charge? The book ‘If I was Prime Minister’ investigates this thought further. Stimulating the children’s enthusiasm through fun and delightful and humorous illustrations from the author reflecting Australian culture we are drawn into children’s ‘wild imagination’.
Start the exploration of the number zero and its role by hearing its story from Zero herself. Upset that she doesn’t feature in the count and having failed to transform herself into a different number, Zero is trying to find her value and her place among the other numbers.
The book ‘Papa’s Mechanical Fish’ illustrates how children’s questions can lead to wonderful discoveries and new learnings. Working collaboratively with their peers; children can explore many possibilities, evaluate their observations and help to solve everyday problems. What questions and problems can you solve by encouraging a sense of wonder with children?
Although her mother tried to steer her towards mathematics and away from following her father, Lord Byron, down the dark path of poetry and imagination, Ada Lovelace found that creativity and logic go well together after all. Ada grew up to be a mathematician and is often regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a “computing machine”.
The story is about Annabelle and her adventures in a cold and dark town using a never-ending box of colourful yarn to bring about transformation in this community with a variety of colourful yarn creations. Use the story as a platform to launch into a variety of explorations with the children.
Wonderfully depicting children’s love for playfully discovering the natural world around them, the book encourages them to see things differently. Celebrate children’s enthusiasm for thinking outside the box by finding new functions for a stick, dreaming up different futures for a sea shell or imagining the adventures of a gumnut.
Combine children’s creativity and imagination with learning about the natural world and broadening their vocabulary by learning the animals’ names, making their conversations and observations more specific. Imagine is a wonderfully illustrated book with a sense of wonder and abundance of colour.
Celebrating children’s appreciation of nonsense and giving them the power to make adults say silly things, The Book With No Pictures bravely leaves the realm of the picture book behind and focuses on sound instead.
This funny rant by Warren, a koala who is sick of being called a bear, is a great reminder that it is important to use correct terminology when speaking to children. You can also try to introduce more scientific language into the children’s vocabulary, for example, by talking about what makes a koala a marsupial.