Everything Under the Sun

Molly Oldfield

Ladybird, 2021

256pp., hbk., RRP $A39.99

9780241433461

Subtitled A curious question for every day of the year this remarkable book that started life as a podcast based on questions submitted by children, contains 366 curious questions such as How much bamboo can a giant panda eat?  Do aliens exist?  What we would do if we didn’t have a prime minister?  Why do hammerhead sharks have such strange-shaped heads?

Subdivided into questions for each month of the year it not only offers answers to the questions that kids ask that invariably stump the adults around them, but it gives the child all sorts of information that can be dropped into the dinner-table conversation to take it on a new path.  It is also one that groups will pore over as they try to outdo each other with their new knowledge.

But my favourite part is the scope it offers for developing information literacy.  It could either be used as a stimulus offering teachers a ready-made question to be investigated and answered by students and their answers compared to that in the book or it could be a model for students to ask and answer their own questions to develop their own month of curious questions.  That way they have purpose for learning, can seek help with the particular part of the information literacy process they actually need, can answer the question “how did you find out?” so they can reflect on their learning, and then share both their product and their process by creating a display for the library that includes this book, encyclopedia and other reference and non fiction titles. 

If the information literacy process is new to you click here and choose ‘present’ to learn more.