Hello teachers!

The Halloween decorations are creeping in, but we’re starting this week with something that deserves attention all year: helping kids question what they see online.

Governor-General Sam Mostyn calls media literacy education ‘beyond essential’, and we’ve got five little ways to get started. We’re also handing the questions over to Australia’s kids for a chat with Aaron Blabey, opening The Vault for Halloween, and finishing with some literal smashing pumpkins.

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Last week, she joined Bryce for a conversation that had been planned for some time, but fell in the week of the terrible attack on Federal MP Helen Haines. Against that backdrop, her message about civics and helping kids think critically about the content they consume online carried particular weight.

Listen to their conversation on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

And with Media Literacy Week upon us, we’ve got a simple way to get those conversations started in your classroom.

Five days. Five bite-sized Newshounds tips. Each short audio tip at the end of the Squiz Kids podcast gives students something to think about as they navigate their online world, with our trusty reminder to Stop, Think, Check. Play one each day, leave a little room for discussion, and help your class build the habit of asking questions before believing or sharing.

And if those tips get noses twitching? Sign up for Newshounds, our media literacy program, for more lessons and classroom resources to help students become thoughtful, questioning consumers of information.

Because we can’t check every piece of content our kids encounter, but we can help them learn which questions to ask.

The author and illustrator behind The Bad Guys, Pig the Pug and Thelma the Unicorn chats with Bryce about his wonderfully ridiculous characters, seeing his stories on the big screen, and keeping going when a book doesn’t find its audience. There’s plenty to make your class laugh, plus some lovely encouragement for your budding writers.

And if students are looking for their next read, Aaron’s new Game of Pets series introduces Griff, a talking axolotl called Bob, and an intergalactic game show in which our pets are up to something decidedly suspicious. Book one, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, is out now wherever you normally get your books.

Thankfully, nothing that needs a pest controller or a Ghost Buster. Just a whole back catalogue of podcasts for almost any occasion. Many with classroom worksheets ready to go.

With Halloween creeping closer, why not treat your class to our Shortcut to Halloween? We uncover where the celebration came from, why people dress up, and how it became an annual hunt for lollies.

There are differentiated comprehension worksheets for Moon (Years 2–3), Star (Years 4–5) and Sun (Years 6+), plus a couple of ways to bring some spooky thinking into your classroom:

Frightfully good maths: Use Halloween stats to create your own maths problems. There’s more than one way to make numbers scary…

A room full of fears: Explore phobias, then design a terrifying room for your class haunted house. Spiders? Heights? A whiteboard marker that’s run dry? Perhaps that last one’s just for the teachers.

Listen to our Shortcut to Halloween and find the comprehension activities here.

Some people carve pumpkins. Samudra the elephant prefers a more direct approach.

At Oregon Zoo’s annual Squishing of the Squash, he made short work of a 227-kilogram pumpkin stuffed with lettuce, apples and sweet potatoes. His little sister, Tula-Tu, got a smaller pumpkin of her own because nobody likes being left out of a pumpkin smashing.

If your week could use a moment of extremely satisfying destruction followed by snacks, this one’s for you.

Here’s what’s happening around the country and the world:

Global Media and Information Literacy Week

Children’s Week

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday