Barnabus Project Interactive Reading

The Barnabus Project: An insightful view on imperfections and story telling

By Leia Desjardins, Melissa Nerio Vasquez & Yalda Rasooli

" “Teachers and experimenters were trained to apply... reading techniques to prompt child responses by asking open-ended questions or making comments and to support children’s enthusiasm and learning opportunities by providing positive reinforcement or relating the story text to their real-life experiences." 

​Mol, S. E., Bus, A. G., & de Jong, M. T. (2009). Interactive Book Reading in Early Education: A Tool to Stimulate Print Knowledge as Well as Oral Language. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 979–1007. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654309332561

Open Ended

What do you think this book is about?

What do you think the story is going to be?

Open Ended

How would you feel if you were in Barnabus' place, stuck in this bell jar all the time?

Do you agree with Barnabus that nothing is impossible? Why?

Open Ended

What do you think this red "Fail" stamp means?

Open Ended

Now that they are all free, where do you think they are going to go? What are they going to do?

Open Ended

Do you think Barnabus and his friends will get caught? What do the images tell us about the following pages?

Open Ended

Did you enjoy the story? The images?

What is one thing you appreciated and one you would change about it?

Multiple Choice

Who was the main character(s) in the story?

• Barnaby

• The Green Rubber Suits

• Barnabus

• Pip the cockroach

​Barnabus Lab Activity

Create a drawing (or a play doe statue) of your perfect 'Failed Project'.

What does it look like? (Combination of animals, colours​, sizes) Prepare to share to your peers and to explain how your creation reflects some of your own imperfections. (3 min)

​“The National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996) recommends that children in kindergarten to grade 4 learn to describe the motion of an object.” 

“Given this thinking about imagining and narratives, we thought using a narrative might encourage children to use their imaginations in learning to describe motion.”

​Enfield, M., & Matthew, E. (2012). Story book science. Science and Children, 50(2), 46-49.

" • Results showed that children’s oral language as well as print knowledge benefited from interaction before, during, and after shared reading sessions 

• That is, about 6% of the growth in oral language skills could be explained by an interactive reading intervention in an educational setting 

• The lexical restructuring hypothesis assumes that remembering and recognizing words in smaller segments become more efficient as children acquire more and more words via spoken language experiences.​

• As Ms. Mitchell’s students demonstrated, young children are capable of successfully engaging with informational texts to build scientific knowledge. 

• Science and literacy were interconnected as children relied on literacy skills to communicate their understandings and utilized informational texts as resources for building scientific knowledge."

 

​Mol, S. E., Bus, A. G., & de Jong, M. T. (2009). Interactive Book Reading in Early Education: A Tool to Stimulate Print Knowledge as Well as Oral Language. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 979–1007. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654309332561