Inspiring Australia read4Nature projects at the Wimmera Libraries
“This Inspiring Australia initiative is supported by the Australian Government through the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education in partnership with Jeanie Clark, enviroed4all, and the Wimmera Regional Library Corporation.”
-Science in Our Picture Books-
involved the Wimmera community in the creation a this resource of over 230 reviews and ideas for learning and appreciating Nature Science from picture and board books found in eight of the
Wimmera Regional Library Corporation’s Branches in 2012
You can access these resources via dropbox here or by the specific theme lists on the next page.
There is an index page for each theme and subtheme with hyperlinks to the jpeg resource sheets for each book. The information for each book, covers its potential for Nature Science and ideas for using it and reading further, based in the WRLC. A search on-line should find these books in other library catalogues or with booksellers.
Origin of this read4Nature Resource
Read4Nature – Science in our Picture Books – was the working title for the “Love2Read? Find Science in books, share it! Inspiring Australia @ your library”project grant from Inspiring Australia – Unlocking Australia’s Potential. (see report in Weekly Advertiser )
The funding enabled me to be able to offer this read4Nature project to library communities in eight Wimmera towns through their libraries in winter 2012.
The participants were involved in two stages –
1 )a workshop to identify the Science in a selection of picture books and to plan actitivities to build on these for
2) and to share these with youngsters during National Science Week,
There was a wonderful response, and we had fantastic National Science Week events in the eight towns with local children based on these run by the participants.
Following this, for each library, I worked with books we had not had time to do in the Workshops and added these to the resources created by the participants. For each library, I made a folder with all the sheets of books selected for Nature Science value.These read4Nature Resource Folders were placed in the libraries during September to be accessible for their community to be able to find suitable books about Nature and have ideas for using them.
The next stage was collating all the sheets from all the libraries into one resource – a digital read4Nature version. The link to this is now at the top of this webpage and the individual themes are on the next webpage. They are under the following headings : farm, bush, marine and board books and there are subthemes within some of these.
If you would like to add books to this or the earlier versions of read4Nature on this website, please use the master sheets here and email them to me. … and if you find anything that doesn’t work, please let me know.
There was a companion project to this done by children for children at the Jeparit Primary School using the Wimmera’s mobile MARC library for small rural schools. Between the two we have the Wimmera pretty well covered with its library books!
Go to what was done at the branches with reports on these here or direct to the resources page here for the books by themes and links to their locations in dropboxes.
This word document lists all books reviewed under the Read4Nature projects List of all Books in the Read4Nature website
