icture books can be attractive starting points to help our older students explore and understand social and environmental issues.

Many of those available today contain a powerful message which can be used to stimulate discussion and writing, and the reduced amount of text allows the book to be covered easily in a session and the illustrations appeal to visual-spatial learners.

Use some of the following strategies to help your students respond to these questions :
What message or social issue is the author dealing with in this book?
What do you know about this issue already?
How do the language, characters, and illustrations contribute to helping your understanding?
What other techniques were used?
Has the author been successful in getting the message across? Why?
Is the author's opinion apparent?
What is your personal opinion about the issue?
Did anything in the book help you form this or change it?
How could you find out more?
What would be your best information source?
How can you check your new information is
*accurate
*up-to-date
*relevant
*unbiased?

hinking Tools help the children consider all aspects of the problem.

Try De Bono’s Other People’s Viewpoints, OPV. List the people involved in an issue – for example if we were discussing Logging the Forests we would need to think about the companies involved, the people working for them and the environmentalists. Divide the class into three groups each representing one of the above. Each group discusses the positive, negative and interesting aspects of the issue from their particular viewpoint. Groups report back to the class.

	P- Positives	N - Negatives	I -Interesting
Logging Company
Workers
Emvironmentalists

 

nother useful technique is called Corners. Discuss the issue as a class and ask students do they Agree, Strongly Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. Each corner of the room is assigned one of these decisions. The students move to that corner and as a group list the reasons for their choice.

The reasons are shared with the class and the students can choose again basing their new choice on the arguments put forward from the groups.

 

uggestions for suitable books include

Cry Me a River – Rodney McRae
Remember Me – Margaret Wild and Dee Huxley
One Less Fish – Kim Michelle Toft and Allan Sheather
Deliverance of the Dancing Bears – Elizabeth Stanley
One Child – Christopher Cheng and Steven Woolman
The Lorax – Dr Seus
Lukes Way of Looking – Nadia Wheatley and Matt Ottley
Old Pig – Margaret Wild
The Rabbits – John Marsden
Rose Blanche – Roberto Innocenti
Jenny Angel – Margaret Wild and Anne Spudvilas

Other books and suggested lessons can be found on the CMIS Focus on Fiction site

 

hare your favourites and your findings with the other schools doing this activity.  Visit the Get Connected page to see who they are!