Book Dash and Clicker
If you have been exploring LearningGrids recently, you may have seen the new Clicker Book, The Boy Who Only Ate Pancakes. The book is the latest in our collaboration with the organization, Book Dash.
In this blog, we’ll be exploring the Book Dash collection, its purpose, and how you can use the collection with your learners.
What is Book Dash?
Book Dash is a nonprofit organization based in South Africa. Their vision is that - “every child should own a hundred books by the age of five.”
Book Dash’s volunteer creatives have written hundreds of open-access picture books. Many of the books have strong African themes, but the messages of the stories are universal. Most of the books are aimed at early readers, and many are available in multiple languages. The books are published under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license, which means that anyone can access and use the books for free!
Book Dash and Clicker
Book Dash wants as many children as possible to have access to their stories. That’s why they have given us permission to use their resources to create Clicker Books and supporting activities. We don’t make any changes to the original stories, and we also try to maintain the original designs of the books as much as possible.
Working with Book Dash gives our users access to stories with diverse representation. The stories have beautiful illustrations to engage readers and bring the stories to life. On all our resources, we give full acknowledgement to Book Dash, so hopefully through Clicker, more people are becoming familiar with their organisation and their mission.
We currently have 12 Book Dash books published on LearningGrids, which you can find in Story Corner. For all the titles, we create a Clicker Book version of the story, as well as a range of speaking and writing activities to support the book. These include Sentence and Connect Sets to rewrite the story with varying levels of support, as well as Word Banks and a Make a Book to create your own version of the story. A Talk Set is also provided to practice recording the story before the writing activities or to create an oral presentation.
Curriculum links
In many cases, we also create Clicker Boards or other resources that link the theme of the book to other curriculum areas or topics. In the latest story, the boy’s mom sneaks healthy ingredients into her son’s pancakes since that is the only food he will eat. This book is a good stimulus for discussions about healthy eating. You’ll find quite a few related resources already on LearningGrids. Plus, we have included a Clicker Board with the Book Dash resources that encourages students to think of healthy items that they could add to different foods, such as with pizza or yogurt or pancakes.
There are a number of books that are great for links to social emotional learning. For example, Who Is Our Friend? (about a group of animals who have an unlikely friend that helps them) is a perfect lead-in for talking about the importance of friendship and how friends help us. Or My Inside Weather - a story about a child who uses the weather to talk about her feelings.
There are also books that lend themselves to focusing on word level work, such as Little Ant’s Big Plan. It is about how an ant’s love of reading saves the day, but it also has rhyming words for students to explore. A House for Mouse can be used to have a closer look at the use of adjectives in the description of Mouse’s dreams.
Some books, such as What If (a story about a girl with a big imagination), are a perfect inspiration for students’ own story writing. Goldfish Genius, which is a text-free book, provides a valuable opportunity for students to develop their own creative story-telling skills.
What’s coming next?
Next month, we will be publishing resources for the book "Going Places.” It is about the adventures children can go on when they read books – great for discussions with students about what type of adventures they like to read about.
Keep your eyes out on LearningGrids for more Book Dash titles in the future!
If you’d like to learn more about using our LearningGrids content to support your students, you can read these blogs:
