How can literacy be applied across other subject areas in the curriculum? This section of the Virtual Literacy Centre will help you with ideas to do just that! Here, you will find how literacy and literature can enhance other curriculum areas.

Here are just two examples for enhancing literacy in the media of Art and Mathematics.

A Literary Maths Challenge

	Take the number of Little Pigs in the story.
	Multiply it by the number of Billy Goats Gruff.
	Divide by the number of people going to St. Ives.
	Add the number of creatures in the bed at the beginning of Ahlsburg's book.
	Add the number against the tide in the book by Bruce Clements.
	Add the number of reindeer Santa had in A Visit from St. Nicholas.
	Subtract the number of bad ants in Chris Van Allsburg's book.
	Divide by the number of planets we have going around our sun.
	Divide by the number of wishes we usually get in fairy tales . . .
	. . . and you get the number Johnny was in the book by Maurice Sendak.

Literacy and Colour

Make a large rainbow arc using titles of books against each colour or, if you're talented with letter cutting, use the coloured letters of the title to make the rainbow arc. Against the red use such titles as My Red Umbrella, The Red Pony and Little Red Riding Hood. For orange use The Big Orange Splot, The Mystery of the Flying Orange Pumpkin, and Oranges and Lemons. Yellow could give you The Yellow House Mystery, Old Yeller(!), and Yellow and Pink. Green brings to mind Greenwitch, The Green Book, and Green Says Go. For blue you can use A Solitary Blue, The Blue-Eyed Daisy, The Blue Moose, and Bluebear. Purple is harder, but there's The Purple Coat, and the The Purple Cow.

If you have a drawing of a large pot of paint at the bottom from which the rainbow appears to come, you can have titles on or in the can which have many colours in them such as Hailstones and Halibut Bones, Little Blue and Little Yellow, and Colours. Leave the ends of each colour in the rainbow looking as if they were dripping paint and tack a real paint brush near the can. Title the board The Rainbow Connection.

Use Mary O'Neil's Hailstones and Halibut Bones with illustrations by John Wallner (Doubleday, 1989 ISBN 0-385-24485-1) as the starting point for your colourful time in the library. Read the poem for each of the rainbow colours and ask the pupils to find other poems which talk about that particular colour or about things that are that colour. Books with that colour in the title are not hard to find, but don't stop there. There are things red such as apples and cherries and you can stay down that road for a whole month easily.

Demonstration reference material for this page is taken from Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site