Enter the gingerbread man!

Last week, Stage 1 and Early Stage 1 investigated versions of the fairy tale, The gingerbread man. This week, we will explore some Youtube clips of gingerbread recipes, attributes of foxes, and read Kel Richards’ The lamington man, an Australian version of the classic tale.


Ginger bread man – Fairy tales in English – animated / cartoon stories for kids


Fairytale: The gingerbread man read by John Krasinski by Speakaboos


2 adopted foxes and the ‘stepmom’ dog


Ylvis – The fox (What does the fox say?) [Official music video HD]


How to make a gingerbread man: gingerbread man recipe from Cookies Cupcakes and Cardio


Play Doh gingerbread man gingerbread recipe: how to make gingerbread man


Gingerbread man cookie recipe – Laura Vitale – Laura in the kitchen, Episode 253

Too many elephants in this school!

NSS

Coinciding with today’s National Simultaneous Storytime 2014, here’s a box of elephants from the picture book, “Too many elephants in this house” by Ursula Dubosarsky and Andrew Joyner. It was created with masking tape, red acrylic paint with sponged shading, blue corrugated cardboard, black ink permanent marker and pink and silver waterbomb balloons. Trunks were cut from matching pink and silver plastic partyware bowls.

Week 21 Boxes

Week 21 Boxes Back of Elephant house

This back panel was left unpainted deliberately. Note the yellow plastic ladder emerging from the chimney hole.

Week 21 Boxes last one in
One more elephant squeezes in!

Here’s a great book trailer for the picture book:


Too many elephants in this house by Ursula Dubosarsky
& Andrew Joyner


And an elephant story we once retold as a digital slideshow on PhotoPeach:


The elephant’s child

UPDATE:
Just before 11.00 this morning, the school library at Penrith Public School was invaded by a herd of tiny elephants, to help celebrate National Simultaneous Storytime 2014:

Elephants

Elephants 2

Elephants 3

Hicketty Picketty: preparing for Chicks R Us

This week, students in Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 will be learning the nursery rhyme Hicketty Picketty. We will also be reading Out of the egg, by Tina Matthews, which is a variation of The little red hen fairy tale.

The inclement weather last Friday gave Class 1HB another chance to brainstorm a digital story. This time they ended up with an Easter theme, which will prove useful with other classes as the term progresses:


An Easter tale

The subsequent week consolidates the learning with this digital quiz on PhotoPeach, which draws upon images and information gathered in 2011 after a unit of work based upon the annual Chicks R Us experience:


What’s in the egg?

Another picture book favourite is Clifford’s happy Easter by Norman Bridwell, which features a North American (spring season!) Easter egg hunt and the dyeing of boiled eggs.

And our PhotoPeach digital story about Clifford the Big Red Dog’s last visit to our school library:


Clifford & Phoebe at Penrith PS

Jack and Jill and friends

This week, our Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students were investigating the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill. The following digital slideshow dates back to 2011, and was created during the previous three-year cycle:


Jack and Jill

HooplaKidz TV present two Youtube videos about Jack and Jill. Note that, in the first one, Jack breaks a crown fit for a king, rather than his actual head.


Nursery rhymes for kids – Jack and Jill – nursery rhyme


Jack and Jill – Olive & the Rhyme Rescue Crew

We read two books on the theme of friends, Eight by Lyn Lee & Kim Gamble, about a lost toy octopus, and Brave Squish Rabbit by Katherine Battersby. Coincidentally, both picture books feature a thunderstorm. The students of Classes 2RB, 1IW and 2S then brainstormed the following digital story about friends:


We are friends!

UPDATE: I found a different slideshow about friends on Facebook, also by Year 1 students, at another school:


We are friends! by Mrs. Burnett’s First Grade class

Robbie Rules: My first day at school

This digital story is especially for author Meredith Costain, with many thanks for sending Penrith Public School the signed copy of her wonderful new picture book, My first day at school (Windy Hollow Books, 2013). The book’s illustrations are by Michelle Macintosh.

Stage 3 students have recently been working as “buddies” for Kindergarten Orientation, and they enjoyed having Meredith’s book read to them in a library session, and then reminiscing, brainstorming, storyboarding, photographing, and suggesting possible text for a joint construction to create a PhotoPeach presentation. We anticipate our incoming Kindergarten students, future buddies and staff and students at other schools to get some useful tips from it.

Special thanks to Ms Stockton, who allowed Robbie Rules – our oldest “student” at Penrith PS, who’s never graduated from Stage 1 – to visit the library for the last few weeks of Term 4, 2013.


Robbie Rules: My first day at school

Monloc restored!

In 2011, a group of Stage 3 students created a series of storyboards and a wonderful final science fiction digital story for the Shaun Tan Book Rap, inspired by such audio, visual (and audiovisual) delights as The lost thing. Poor Monloc the protector was lost in the Great PhotoPeach Data Crash of December 2012, but has now been restored to a new URL. His creators, the Lost Bottlecap Collectors, have all gone off to various high schools, but I know they revisit our school pages every now and then. We hope you (and they) will enjoy Monloc’s triumphant return from near-oblivion:


Monloc the protector by the Lost Bottlecap Collectors of Penrith PS

Wrapping up Book Week

A few months ago, I did a presentation to the MANTLE Teacher Librarians’ Conference in Newcastle about creating book trailers and digital stories. As part of the preparation, a series of space and science fiction related digital photos had been newly uploaded to Photo Peach (“Here’s one I prepared earlier…” again) and I was able to demonstrate how images could be easily moved, duplicated or deleted in the editing process.

During the presentation, members of the audience suggested a few possible captions, in keeping with Book Week’s “Read Across the Universe” theme, and my intention was to get the Stage 3 students, back at school, to complete the brainstorming of the rest of the captions during Book Week. As the events of that week overwhelmed us, I filed away the groups’ A3 planning sheets, but dug them out again this week – and was thrilled with their results.

As promised, here is the finished slideshow:


Read across the universe by 5/6E

and an additional set of bookish/SF images that got the students’ conversations going:


Book Week 2013

A reminder to those on iPads: the latest version of Flash is required, so you’ll need to use a regular computer to see Photo Peach slideshows.

By the way, we found “Robot jokes” during a Google search:
boyslife.org/about-scouts/merit-badge-resources/robotics/19223/robot-jokes/

and we were surprised to find that there are interactive “Yoda speech generator” sites (it started out as a joke that there might be one – and there were several!), such as:
www.yodaspeak.co.uk/

And this just in: the Tuesday Library Book Club at Wyong High School was inspired by my presentation at MANTLE and spent some time with their teacher librarian, Ms Murray, making claymation figures to create an Animoto audiovisual to celebrate Book Week 2013 and its theme HERE. Wow!