What’s in an Explorer’s Guide?
Explorer’s Guides are packed with everything we’ve done in our literature workshops. Our online guides make it easy and fun for you to do what we do, in whole or in part.
ABOUT EXPLORER’S GUIDES
We've put our workshop planning into guides, so YOU can lead kids through great books!Each Explorer’s Guide includes everything below:
- sensory prop ideas: see, hear, smell, and feel what the characters did
- bookbites ideas: taste what the characters ate
- creative project ideas & instructions/templates: make what a character made
- kinetic activity ideas & instructions/prompts: do what a character did (or might/should have!)
- academic handouts: learn the story’s narrative arc, vocabulary, setting, and more
- creative writing handouts: write what a character wrote or felt
- takeaway topics: know what the characters knew
- learning links: learn more about what the characters’ world was like
- audiovisual links: see and hear what the characters’ world looked and sounded like
- CCSS alignment: check off lots of boxes!
Our straight-from-the-story activities connect to key teaching points. So while your kids are having fun doing something a character did, they’re learning what that character learned. That might be a survival tip, a gymnastics trick, a writing skill, a history lesson, or any of ten thousand things that are good to know. But most importantly, with your guidance, they’ll learn what they have to know:
That person got through something hard, and so can I.
Experience is the best teacher, second only to you. When you take kids through great books in hands-on ways, you’re teaching them for life.
Click the button below to view a whole guide for Little House in the Big Woods. (If you’re teaching that book, help yourself to our ideas and materials!) Here are some tips for using our guides. Still have questions? Check out our FAQ, or get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!
FREE Explorer's Guide
We hold experiential workshops for kids in Santa Cruz.
We put our workshop planning into Explorer’s Guides.