Loading Profile...
EMPLOYEE
Using the library
The ICDL is a rich resource which can be used in a wonderfully wide range of situations by children, parents, teachers, librarians and others from all walks of life. Children can expand upon the stories to create games; parents can extract themes to help explain important lessons; teachers can utilize the multicultural nature of the collection to teach languages; librarians can enrich community outreach programs with tales from around the world and; of course, anyone can just open a book to read for pleasure.
This is a place to discuss the ways people are using the library. As each of you use the library, please consider posting a short note describing how you did so. Your activities can help other children foster a love of reading too. I'll kick this off by adding some activities that we already know people do with the library.
This is a place to discuss the ways people are using the library. As each of you use the library, please consider posting a short note describing how you did so. Your activities can help other children foster a love of reading too. I'll kick this off by adding some activities that we already know people do with the library.
I’m engaged
Follow this discussion to get notifications on your dashboard.
Create a customer community for your own organization
Plans starting at $19/month
-
Inappropriate?Read for Pleasure: The simplest way to use the ICDL is to just read a book. Pick one of the featured books from the home page, search books using Simple Search – or the Advanced Search or Location Search at the bottom of the Simple Search page. Then read away – for free and anonymously. Or you can create an account to keep a bookshelf of books you like and set various personal preferences.
-
Inappropriate?Digital Story Time: If you have a standard computer projector, then try using it the next time you read a book to children (whether in a library's story time hour, in school, or at home). Simply hook up the projector to your computer, find a book in the ICDL and read with the large projected display. This has the advantage of making illustrations (and words) large enough for everyone to see – and the technical nature of the display is often engaging. To make it work as well as possible, be sure to maximize your browser window (on Windows, try View->Full Screen). And once you get to the book pages within ICDL, click on the icon on the top right which reduces the size of the navigation icons – making more room for the page image.
-
Inappropriate?Scavenger Hunt: It can be fun to learn how to navigate the ICDL and search for books if you are looking for something in particular. So, if you want to teach people how to use it – consider finding a few favorite books, pull out some particular tidbits from those stories – and then ask kids you are teaching to try and find those books based on those tidbits. Or ask more basic questions such as how many books there are in the ICDL from Africa, or even simpler, find a picture book that is short and has a blue cover and report the title and author. See more details for this activity in our teacher training manual.
-
Inappropriate?Complete the Story: Use the first half of any book to inspire children to complete the story. Read the first portion of the book together – then ask children to envision how the story ends by drawing pictures and illustrating them.
-
Inappropriate?Creative Writing: If you really want to push your creativity, try looking at a picture book in a language you don't understand at all. Then write a story to go along with the pictures.
-
Inappropriate?Learning Languages: Many of the books in the ICDL are available in more than one language. Use these books to study a language you don't know. Use the Advanced Search screen to search for books in two or more languages. Then try reading in the language you are studying. If you aren't sure you understand the page completely, switch that page to the language you do know with the popup menu underneath the page. For example, The Blue Sky is available in English, Croatian, and Italian.
