7 Activities from the Do You Know? Series

These fascinating books are perfect for some at-home activities with your child. From watching videos to reading and comprehension, here’s how to get the most out of the series.

Do You Know? is a series of levelled non-fiction books featuring video content, project work and critical-thinking activities to motivate and engage young learners. We’ve compiled some activities that are perfect for home learning and don’t require any planning or preparation. Each book in this series also has lesson plans, audio, videos and the answer keys which are all available to browse on the Ladybird Readers website.

Read: Animal Families

Activity 1. Exploring new words

Review the ‘New words’ section with your young learners. Ask them to guess the key words for the pictures and use this as a pre-reading task.

Activity 2. Watching videos

Read through the text with your young learner and use the pictures to enhance the reading experience. After reading, watch the video and use the questions at the bottom of page 7 as a focal point.

Read: Coral Reefs

Activity 1. Discuss the front cover

Use the visuals on the front of the book and ask if your learner knows anything about coral reefs. This is a useful starter activity before any reading takes place. Why not talk about where you can find coral reefs, and how they are created.

Activity 2. Reading and comprehension

Read the two pages above with your student. Use the ‘Look’ question at the bottom right as a useful tool to test comprehension.

Read: Mammals

Activity 1. Use the Contents page

Choose some of the questions from the contents page as a preface to see if your young learner has any prior knowledge of the topic. This is an effective way to discuss the theme and set the scene before any reading takes place.

Activity 2. Project tasks

Read the pages above with your student, then use the ‘project task’ at the bottom right to help reinforce the topic and take the focus away from reading. This is an effective task to integrate further language skills and reinforce the main ideas from the book.

Read: Animals and The Weather

Activity 1: Use learning materials on the website

There is a huge range of resources to use in each title. Animals and the Weather has three videos that learners can watch. Each video has a transcript, which can be a useful tool because you can use the transcript to ask questions about the content.

There are individual lesson plans for each title. They will guide you through each activity and there is an answer key too!

The lesson plans focus on a range of language areas including grammar which is graded appropriately for the level of the book. The audio is a resource that can be used before or after reading and is an effective tool for audio learners and can help bring the book to life.