Ginnette Cameron-Gardner – Teacher/Librarian

We are pleased to welcome our readers back from their vacations.

So many students are keen to tell us about what they read in the holidays and also to request to borrow the next book in the series or more books written by the author whose work they have enjoyed reading.

The students are enjoying starting to study new topics in class. Picture books feature strongly in the curriculum as content-rich picture books assist students to access information on topics in a format that due to its illustrations makes it easier to understand difficult concepts. Picture books are written for all ages and are written on multiple levels and this aids students with different reading levels to access the information. Picture books can be fiction or non-fiction and the Primary Library has a very large collection of them. The non-fiction picture books support studies about migration, refugees, World Wars, the Holocaust, Adaptation of flora and fauna in many different eco systems, and many other topics.

An example of these is Eve Bunting’s Terrible things. An allegory of the Holocaust.  This is an allegory for how people slowly disappeared from Germany and no one spoke up.

The fiction picture books provide shorter stories that due to their brevity have less complex plots which suit many readers who are time poor and also lend themselves to close study. Some are particularly written for the novice reader but others such as Gary Crew’s The Water Tower are quite dark and are aimed at a more mature reader.

There are two locations for fiction in picture book formats in the Primary Library. Those books suited to the younger reader are in the J picture book collection and those for the more mature reader are in the literature collection at 823.3 – the High School Library  also has a picture book collection.

Picture books activate the students’ thinking on a visual level and still employ story elements including character, setting, plot conflict, resolution. With the aid of the pictures, students of different reading levels can share understanding as their comprehension shifts from text to pictures with the pictures adding to the text.

Some picture books such as Just an Ordinary Day by Rod Clement have illustrations that alter the meaning of the tex, such as: “It was the beginning of just another day…..Amanda awakened to the sound of her alarm which rang at 6.30 am every school day.”