This box of books and ideas will take you to the ends of the earth – and the beginning of time. Time and Landscape are seriously big ideas. We want to help you to look at everything around you differently – and use books, reading and writing to make your own world more interesting and exciting.
First big idea: LOOKING
There are many ways of looking. Most of us just look quickly, without thinking much about what we see. We enjoy life, but we don’t always feel it very deeply.
Artists – poets, authors, photographers and musicians and others – are called creatives because they experience life using all their senses. Then they examine what they have felt and create beautiful words, sounds or images for all of us.
Scientists look very carefully at what interests them in the world. Sometimes they look through microscopes (to see things that are very small). Sometimes they look through telescopes (to see things that are very far away). There are thousands of different ways to really, really look at parts of our world.
In this toolbox we will show you ways of writing and reading that use all these kinds of looking:
Fiction Stories based on how creative people experience the world
Non-Fiction Writing about how scientists, and others, look very carefully at the world.
It is also possible to see the world using a mixture of these two kinds of looking and thinking. The best non-fiction uses creative ideas as well as facts. The best fiction is based on true facts that have been looked at by scientists.
Second Big Idea: THEORIES
Ideas don’t always become fact. People – scientists and others – have new ideas that need to be tested and proved. New ideas are exciting. They have to be discussed and thought about, tested and experimented with. Theories are fun to think about. Sometimes they become fact. Sometimes they disappear.
So … fasten your seatbelts for the ride through space and time!
Sources:
We will be using a wide variety of materials, from specially written texts to articles and other materials from the Internet and elsewhere. Many of the daily activities are built around books from the Rainbow Readers reading series published by Cambridge University Press from 2007. We also have input from, and are grateful to,the Kalahari Peoples Fund at https://www.kalaharipeoples.org/
Image: Sourced from NASA
