Hook

Setting up the learning to engage children and excite them makes a huge difference to the way they approach a new book.  A hook can:

• provide an immersive multisensory experience with artefacts, images, sounds…and even smells
• start with a dramatic scenario to provoke questioning
• kick off with a visit to a place of interest
• present a problem for the children to solve
• be an attractive book display which encourages browsing and roaming around a topic for a period before the book is introduced
• begin with a visit from a writer or an illustrator

On occasion you might create a ‘bells and whistles’ immersive experience that captures the children’s imaginations through stimulation of all the senses. However, on other occasions you might prefer a simple, perfectly pitched, introductory sentence or two: ‘Imagine that you could wish for anything that you wanted, anything at all. Now what would you wish for? Do you think that it would be good if all your wishes came true? That is exactly what happens to the children in the story that we are going to read together. Will it be the dream that they have always hoped for? Let’s find out…’.