Picture books bring the worlds of art, language, imagination, and shared experience to children. We want to make sure the best stories are easily accessible for teachers in our community to bring into the classroom.
From this spring, you can check out any of the nearly 200 books in our collection from the Tokushima University library.
Community members are very welcome to make a library card and check out books. Just let the front desk know you would like to make a card. You can check out books for 2 weeks at a time.
What's in the Collection?
We've done our best to choose books that are child-tested and well loved. The most important goal is to develop a love of reading and stories in our kids. Lifelong readers never stop learning even when they leave our classrooms. We've looked for books in which the pictures strongly support the story, or the pictures ARE the story in the case of the wordless books. We know from language education research that strongly related and interesting visual images give learners valuable support and something to check their understanding against. Good pictures give us unlimited opportunities for communication and interaction with our students too.
We've kept the stories short, but looked for natural cadence and flow. There are a lot of positives to books designed for EFL learners, but natural expression, phrasing, and rhythm of speech can sometimes get lost. If the story is simple and well supported by expressive illustrations, books meant for children whose mother tongue is English can also be loved and understood just as well by English language learners. Even our most difficult stories have no more than 300 unique words in the text and you can search our database by word count to choose the right level for your students. Future Vision
The database and book collection are the initial spark of a bigger vision - we hope in the long term to have lesson plans and extension activities around the stories for each of the books in the collection. It's all about teachers helping teachers. If you have a book you love and maybe an extension lesson to go with it, we'd love to publish your idea here too and add the book to the collection if it's not already there. The nature of our job can mean that teachers can sometimes get too isolated from each other as we try to do everything on our own, or if we're lucky with a couple of teacher friends, in our classrooms. This book collection and 英語のナルホド project is one way we can collaborate and give friendly support to each other. Imagine hundreds of tried and tested stories recommendations and lesson plans by and for our community - how wonderful would that be? That's the vision I would love to see realized here.
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