ABOUT ME
Exhausted father, wannabe adventurer and primary school teacher. When I'm not in the fresh air exploring the great outdoors, I'll be reading about something new and exciting, and being a primary school teacher, it gives me an excellent excuse to revisit my own childhood favourites for use in the classroom, and discover the vast multitude of books, preferably adventure stories, that I can inflict upon my pupils.
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As History and Geography Lead in my school, I am fortunate to be passionate about both my subjects and bring them into the school curriculum with more than just a cursory tick of a box. With its many frustrations, Ofsted's new regime of grilling subject leads about their supposed expertise, means that that expertise must exist. As I said, I am lucky that I enjoyed my degree in History and I have a great love for Geography.
Marrying "topic" with literacy is not exactly inventing the wheel by any means, but the choice of book is very important when doing so. This blog hopes to set out to review books that are pertinent to the classroom; bringing a teacher's perspective into the scenario and its appropriateness for being a class book that fits into History, Geography or any other topic. Having often seen this done for various History topics, I have been quite interested recently to see how the same can be done for Geography. Geography often seems like the poor cousin to History at times in the primary curriculum when it really doesn't need to be, and is just as interested as its History brethren.
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Furthermore, the choice of book for your topic, age-group, your school's own history and geography, perhaps even social dynamic has a bearing on a book to choose. For example, where I live and work is predominantly white, so I feel that it is important diverse characters play a part wherever possible; it can seem quite patriarchal at times so the same can be said for a prominent female protagonist. Whatever your overriding value or school ethos, this should be reflected, or at least not contradicted, in the literature that you use.
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All that said, enjoyment and engagement top the list. No two ways about it: if the children in your class enjoy the book they will not only become better readers, but they will be hugely engaged in the topic. You may even have eager children wanting to do their own projects on it, and learning about a particular part in their own time. Not only will this help their History and Geography knowledge, but something will have piqued their interest and to love learning. And let's be honest, that's what teaching is really about.