CORE LIBRARY TEACHERS GUIDE UPPER PRIMARY

This is the third in a series of teachers guides for Scholastic Australia's Core Library reading program, which has been widely sold in Australia and New Zealand. It consists of two parts: detailed lesson plans for each of 40 fiction and information books for upper primary readers, chosen by me and my collaborator and separate scaffolded reading guides for each of those 40 book to be used by students who wish to pursue their reading alone. Both the lesson plans and student guides include a synopsis, themes, questions for discussion before, during and after reading, activities for after reading and suggestions for further research and reading.In order to produce this package, we needed to read widely in fiction and information books available for upper primary/ middle school students, we needed to be familiar with readers' responses to those books, whether in academic articles or reviews done by teachers and students, we needed to have detailed knowledge of the individual Australian state curricula and the new national curriculum, so that we could match activities to specific outcomes. The lesson plans and student guides were written in monthly workshops over the period of one year - often there were four full-day workshops in the month.