Learning Skills: Initiative

The Ontario Government has identified and targeted six key learning skills for student success. Libraries can help teachers and students to understand and develop these skills by providing picture books that model these behaviours and the issues surrounding them.

Learning Skills and Work Habits Sample Behaviours: Responsibility, Organization, Independent Work, Collaboration, Initiative, Self Regulation.

The student:

•  looks for and acts on new ideas and opportunities for learning;
•  demonstrates the capacity for innovation and a willingness to take risks;
•  demonstrates curiosity and interest in learning;
•  approaches new tasks with a positive attitude;
•  recognizes and advocates appropriately for the rights of self and others.

The book begins with a little girl who is bored. She is so bored that she starts to talk to a potato. The potato tells her that she is in fact boring; all kids are boring. The little girl gets a wee bit offended and makes it her mission to prove to the talking spud that kids are anything but boring. She shows all the fun things that kids can do and all of the things that kids are capable of from pretending to fly to yodelling on top of the dirty clothes hamper, (it is the Swiss Alps, you see). 

As a seamstress in the Big House, Clara dreams of a reunion with her Momma, who lives on another plantation--and even of running away to freedom. Then she overhears two slaves talking about the Underground Railroad. In a flash of inspiration, Clara sees how she can use the cloth in her scrap bag to make a map of the land--a freedom quilt--that no master will ever suspect.

Title

Author

Oh, The places you'll Go	Dr. Seuss
Hans My Hedgehog: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm	Brothers Grimm
Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It	Sundee T. Frazier
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile	Bernard Waber
When Harriet Met Sojourner	Catherine Clinton
Eleanor, Ellatony, Ellencake, and Me	Cathy Rubin
Just a Dream	Chris Van Allsburg
Duck on a Bike	David Shannon
Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt	Deborah Hopkinson
The Elves and the Shoemaker	Eric Suben
Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust	Eve Bunting
Sandy's Incredible Shrinking Footprint	Femida Handy
Tacky the Penguin	Helen Lester
Three Cheers for Tacky	Helen Lester
On Meadowview Street	Henry Cole
Snowflake Bentley	Jacqueline  Briggs Martin
Librarian of Basra	Jeanette Winter
Wangari's Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa	Jeanette Winter
Seeds of Change: Wangari's Gift to the World	Jen Cullterton Johnson
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs	Jon Scieszka
Humphfrey Albert and the Flying Machine	Kathryn Lasky
The Gates of the Wind	Kathryn Lasky
One Hen - How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference	Katie Smith Milway
Willows Whispers	Lana Button
Princess and the Pizza	Mary Jane Auch
Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge	Mem Fox
There's an alligator under my bed	Mercer Mayer
Little Hummingbird	Michael Nichol Yahgulanaas
Gabby and Grandma Go Green	Monica Wellington
Coretta Scott	Ntozake Shange
Bored - Nothing To Do	Peter Spier
Zoom	Robert Munsch
Something Beautiful	Sharon Dennis Wyeth
The Berenstain Bears don't pollute (anymore)	Stan Berenstain