Book Week

The story book Handa's Surprise linked year 1 to year 5 classes during Book Week at St Albert College, with a range of varied story telling and writing activities.  Click the link below to learn more.

Book Week Activities

Describing The Gruffalo

 

The Cold Planet

The class teacher requested a writing session about aliens, since it is the topic of the week, that includes the phoneme ch-.  She also expressed the wish to include scientific concepts, such as different light sources and reflection of light.

I started by showing the children a video - The Cold Planet, which is about aliens, with reflection of light being one of the main concepts discussed. 

The torch (ch- phoneme) is the main light source in the video.  Other light sources, such as the sun, the neon tube, the lamp, the candle, the bulb, and so on, were presented to the students.  Other objects were presented together with these light sources, selected on purpose because they contain the phoneme ch-.  Some of these words were chin, child, cherry and lunch.  Flashcards were presented next to the objects, which we read together in class.  The phoneme ch- was pointed out. 

The children were given a workbook on which they had to draw the light sources, and write a sentence to describe each one by following a model. 

Once the sentence writing activity was ready, the children were asked to throw a beam of light on to Neila the Alien, which was stuck up on the board, but without pointing their torches directly at her.  The children had been asked to bring a mirror and a torch with them from home for this activity.  The children were asked to draw how they think they should carry out the task before trying it out (inquiry based science).  However the children found this task difficult to do.  They kept pointing their torches at their mirror, in the direction of Neila, thus blocking out the light.  I had to guide them a little, and instructed them to turn, and give their backs to Neila.  Once they had grasped the concept, the children corrected their drawings on the handout and carried out the task correctly.

Clever Polly

The aim of the session was to describe a character in a story.  The character chosen for the session was the wolf in the story Clever Polly, which is a story in the year 4 text book.  The pre-writing activity was built step by step by the students working in groups.  First, the wolf’s body parts were given to each group to assemble and label, after which the students drew the rest of the body and clothed it.  A clothes’ word bank aided the labeling process.  The students followed a model and described their drawing.  The emphasis was on the wolf’s appearance.  The wolf’s character was subsequently discussed and a paragraph added to the draft.

The Trojan War

Ancient Greece is a study topic for year 5 students at St Albert the Great College.  The writing activity linked to this unit was about the Trojan War.  The timeline was introduced to help students sequence events, after these were reenacted in class  The story’s setting and the characters were also discussed.

Creating Ghost Sounds

Year 3 boys experimented with metal nuts, glass marbles, metal washers and coins, which they rotated inside inflated balloons to create ghost sounds.  The boys reported the results of this science experiment by publishing a simple scientific report.

Story Telling and Writing

Story Telling and Role Play

Which is the best material?

Story telling kicks off writing tasks at St Albert College.  Well known tales, such as The Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs set the scene for math based activities which act as pre-writing tasks for the final writing assignment.  Students have to measure, or sort out pictures in Venn Diagrams, to finalize handouts that are to act as pre-writing handouts.  Role play and hands-on activities involving multiple senses are not lacking either.

Creating the pre-writing handout

Pre-writing aids writing

Sentence writing