Travelling around the world
“Books On Wheels” (English books on travelling) can instill a love of globetrotting amongst your students and teach them about different cultures and the big wide world through captivating travel tales for children. “Travelling around the world” thematic suitcase consists of children’s books that describe voyages, plane and field trips, journeys and travelling in general while it gives the readers the feeling they are actually travelling around the world. The English travelling books suitcase was designed for the Foreign Language classroom and it intends to cater for most students’ needs in terms of reading skills improvement. It includes a few non-fiction books, ie real books which teach, inform and explain. They support CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) and they are quite suitable to teach cross-curricular content such as Geography, Science, RE in the Upper Primary School Grades. Most of the books included in the thematic suitcase are fiction books telling stories that have made-up characters and events and authentic books whose language is or sounds authentic or it is the kind of language learners would read in a real situation. There are a few non-authentic books which are written with a controlled vocabulary in a rather artificial language or they are rewritten to achieve a particular goal namely assisting the teacher in teaching a grammar rule or a language function. The graded readers, simplified and adapted books and abridged versions of English literature which are included in the suitcase are intended solely for the language learner, which makes them within Primary School children’s power to understand. Most of the books are easy for 6th Graders who have already had a four-year instruction in the Foreign Language. Taking into consideration that most English classes are mixed ability ones, the current selection of books can cater for all the students’ linguistic needs. Apart from improving the learners’ Foreign Language reading skills, exposing children to the world – its cultures, people and communities- encourages them to take a global view and grow into citizens of the world.
David A. Hill, teacher, teacher trainer and educational materials writer
