The Book Basket ~ Christmas
Each term in a classroom you enrich your students lives by providing with them with a “text rich environment”. A text rich environment is one that provides children with many different forms of texts to read, create, play and explore with.
How do you create a text rich environment?
Provide children with books of varying genre and style, magazines, newspapers, menus, brochures, audio books, electronic texts, phone books, maps, paper and collage materials to create your own texts anything that helps a child establish a love of reading! Children need to know that text comes in all varieties but it always does one thing, delivers meaning and message.
Generally our classroom has a theme for a month or a term. This allows children to gain information and insight into particular concepts using so many different form of texts! They are bound to find one that appeals to them! We have a LOT of books in our house! I wish I could say I have a system of rotating them but basically I just grab a few different books off a bookshelf and put them on the kids bookshelf whenever I am tidying up! But we do have one book idea working in our home that was inspired by what is working in my classroom!
Introducing the Book Basket!
Each month I am going to gather up some texts centred around a different theme and put them in our book basket. Of course our current book basket theme is….CHRISTMAS!!!
The old faithful Little Golden Books!
Some traditional and some fun, larger picture books!
We have a variety of religious, traditional, Santa and Aussie fun! I am hoping they will be able to learn that the “Christmas Story” can be very different for different people! We are going to point out the differences between the “Stereotypical” christmas (snow, hot chocolate, chimneys) and an “Aussie” Christmas. We are going to play with words from tradtional Christmas songs (Aussie Jingle Bells) and explore the reason for the season through some gorgeous illustrated versions of the Nativity story.
If you dont have a lot of books at home try your local public library, op shops, ebay or amazon. After Christmas is a great time to pick up cheap books! But remember it doesn’t have to be books! Grab some travel brochures from your local travel agent, if travelling grab tourist brochures and maps along the way, keep your takeaway menus and junk mail! Or even better how about swapping the usual” lights and sound” plastic present for an audio book this Christmas! Your child (and their teacher) will be forever grateful!
Do you think you have a text rich environment in your home?