You know how hard it is to pull all the strands of literacy together so that everything makes sense. And, you know how important it is to teach this huge range of literacy skills in a context that makes sense to the children. That’s why so many of us choose to use children’s books as the stimulus for our literacy learning. In this article, I open a window on my approach to planning literacy learning with children’s books.

This article combines learning about poetry with a Christmas craft activity and can even be extended to include a quick and attractive classroom display.

Once upon an ordinary a day an ordinary teacher was looking for an ordinary book to read with her ordinary children during their ordinary guided reading lesson, when..she stumbled across a quite extraordinary book indeed: Once Upon an Ordinary School Day by Colin McNaughton and Satoshi Kitamura.