Here’s the guidance and resource materials for teachers, librarians, parents and others who work with children for Episode Two of The Story Thief Challenges

Story Re-cap questions for children:

1. Why didn’t their father want to tell them about the Story Thief?
2. What evidence did their father have that the Story Thief was real? Did the children believe the evidence?
3. When can the Story Thief steal a story and how can it be contacted?
4. What happened when Aoife mentioned the Story Thief to her father the next morning?
5. Why did Aoife write a letter to the Story Thief? How did Liam feel about this?

Writing advice Re-cap questions:

1. What makes the books you read as a child important?
2. What were the three books that Sinéad read as a child that influenced her writing? Have you read them or heard of them?
3. What were her key lessons from those books?
4. Is there any book you’ve read that is important to you? Why?

Story Challenge:

PS: I’ve got a Story Challenge for you. Do you know how they say you can’t judge a book by its cover? Well, I want you to imagine a book that you’d love to find in a book shop or library. What would the book be called? What would it be about? Now use paper and colours and all your imagination and make the cover for it!

How to do this challenge?

There’s no right way to do this challenge. We’ll outline here how it could be done with a group of children in a school or library or other setting, but it could easily be done at home by a child on the kitchen table on a rainy afternoon. Either way you’ll definitely need A3 size paper at least plus a lot of art supplies.

Some kids will then immediately think of a story for their imaginary book cover. Others won’t. Get those children thinking about their favorite book genre. Is it a war book? Fantasy? What books do they like to read? Get them thinking about the main event or hook of the book, the thing that they’d imagine seeing on the book cover. For example, if it’s a WWII novel then they might want a tank on the cover, etc..

If you can, give them a chance to look at lots of kids’ book covers to get ideas. Take the children to visit their local library or school library to get inspiration. Or have them bring in their own books if they’re already readers. Ask them what draws them to one book over another? Do they judge a book by its cover?

Ideally the children would have a real book to cover.  Any hard back book would be idea, but a paper back would be fine. Have them fold and cut paper to the size and shape of the book they’re using, marking off the spine of the book with a light pencil line.

 

They can then draw out their own cover, the title on the spine and do the back of cover blurb for the book. If they want to get a little more imaginative, they could add reviews from their favorite authors or celebrities, etc.. Let them make their cover as colourful and fun and wacky as they like.

Once all the books covers are finished and carefully blu-tacked or sellotaped onto the book cover, line all them all up on a shelf together. Let the children browse through them. They’ve just created their own library!

Variations on this challenge?

If you don’t have easy access to books for each child to cover then get them to make posters.

Children could make alternative covers for their favorite books instead of making covers for imaginary books.

Once the challenge is completed?

As ever we’d love to see what your kids came up with and show it to all our readers on the kids’ work pages.  Please get in touch on our contact page!