About our interactive guides

What's an interactive guide?

Interactive Guides are an indispensable resource guide for teachers but also an invaluable classroom tool that will help children to structure their writing.

Features

Short, incisive articles introduce the theme and help you get started. In Feelings, our first Guide, we profile prolific author Jacqueline Wilson, favourite among girls 8-12. And we look at the Large Family collection, a set of four stories that mirror hectic family life, as the parents struggle to control events. The book is an ideal classroom read and provides the basis for guided discussion and follow-up activities; we have suggested activities for age ranges 3–5, 5–7, 7–9 and 9–11 years.

Listings

Book listings complement these short articles. The listings are arranged by suggested age group, and include items from the major children's publishers.

All these books suit classroom discussion or individual reading. To help you further, we have taken the popular writing frame model and created an online review system that can be used by pupils. A set of review frames allow children to record their impressions of each book. They'll be asked to rate their enjoyment of the book on a scale of 1 to 5, and their ratings are shown on the main NCLL site where all site visitors can see them. Site visitors, and the children themselves, can see which books are the most popular and read the reviews already submitted.

Getting started

The Guides are laid out straightforwardly – all you need is access to the Web, and a browser that is not too elderly.

Children's reviews using writing frames

A team at Exeter University created writing frames in the mid-1990s as they investigated ways to help children plan and produce a range of writing genres – descriptions, explanations etc. Project participants Maureen Lewis and David Wray described writing frames as 'a kind of scaffolding for children's non-fiction writing' and said that they 'offer a very useful way of introducing children to different written genres and then supporting them in the use of appropriate text structures.' (There is more in Lewis and Wray, Writing across the curriculum. NCLL 1998). Writing frames have since been created to cover a wide variety of genres, and ours have been specially created for the Interactive Guides.

Instructions for children

Find the book in the listings
Check it's the right book (there might be several with the same title, so check the author's name and the publisher)
Follow the link to 'write a review' at the end of the page
Choose a writing frame (your teacher will help you to choose the right one). As you work through the questions you can describe the story and explain why you liked or did not like the book

What did you think of it?

You can also rate the book. When you rate it, you'll be telling other people what you thought of the book. As more people rate the book, you'll be able to see whether other people thought it was as good (or as bad) as you did!

To save your review

You can only save your review when you've completed it. And you will have to ask your teacher to approve what you have written first. When your teacher has done this, you can save the review and it will be stored on the site.