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BOOK OF THE WEEK
This week, the Junior Librarian, Leo E, from Owl class shares with us one of his favourite books.
Leo recommends Supertato: Poo in the Zoo, written by Steve Smallman and illustrated by Ada Gray.
Leo’s reason for his choice: “I think lots of Grimsdell children will enjoy this very funny story! It is one of my favourite books!”
Mrs Harvey would also recommend this humorous, rhyming tale. Little Bob McGrew is the zookeeper, and it’s his job to clean up all the animal poo. It’s not his favourite job, for obvious reasons, but off he goes around the zoo, cleaning up everyone’s poo! It is an exhausting job but he sees an opportunity for change when he encounters some mysterious glowing poo …
The story has a good rhythm and is nicely paced, creating a flow to reading aloud. It is well illustrated and the pictures help to give an extra dimension to the story. In particular the deftly drawn facial expressions of the various animals and the zookeeper will encourage your child to discuss and explore words that have similar meanings, such as surprised, shocked, astounded, amazed and astonished. It could even lead to the use of a thesaurus for older children.
I have written before of the importance of rhyme in the development of early language and literacy skills. Research into early literacy skills shows the importance of rhythm and rhyme. Developing literacy skills begin with listening and verbalising rather than reading and writing. That comes later. Children need a good grasp of phonics and the ability to discriminate sounds and rhyming patterns in an audible way in order to become confident readers.
Stories written in rhyme and rhythm help our children develop auditory discrimination, listening skills, a rich and broad vocabulary, a love of words, concentration skills, phonemic awareness and poetry skills. This in turn stimulates imaginative, descriptive skills – an essential component of creative writing.
Recent research (Sullivan and Brown, 2015) into the development and acquisition of early literacy skills has conclusively shown that rhythm and rhyme play a hugely important role. This is because children’s early literacy skills are about listening and speaking rather than reading and writing. These first two skills are the bedrock foundation for the latter and create much stronger ability in the latter if ingrained deeply and early on. It’s simply not possible to be a good writer if you don’t first of all have a good vocabulary. Similarly, it’s very hard to learn phonics and sight words if you can’t discriminate sounds and rhyming patterns in an audible way. The research states that when comparing the literary abilities of school age children, those who had a good understanding of rhyme from an early age, vastly outperformed those who had little exposure to it before they started school.
Happy Reading!
Mrs Harvey
