Students in Stage 1 and Early Stage 1 will be celebrating Chinese New Year as part of our Celebrations unit in literacy. This year, it will be the Year of the Dog. We will be reading the picture books, New year surprise! by Christopher Cheng & Di Wu and Made in China by Deborah Nash.
Here are some Youtube resources:
Year of the Dog – Wallace & Gromit
2018 Lion Dance in Pavilion KL ushering the Year of the Dog
Today, I want to explore with my teacher colleagues the upcoming National Simultaneous Storytime picture book for 2018, Hickory dickory dash by Tony Wilson & Laura Wood, and how it fits into our existing K-2 literacy cycle, and how it can address English outcomes for Stage 2 and Stage 3 students (see Objective C).
* aspects of Guided Inquiry activities for Stage 2 and Stage 3, team-taught, library lessons this year (Note: units use the KLA’s own syllabus outcomes plus related English outcomes)
* revisit the concept of pre-, mid- and post- surveys for students (from the SLIM toolkit) to collect both qualitative and quantitative data (action research)
* some possible strategies for improving student attitudes and successes with longer form fiction, such as novels (see Objective D).
We also had a visit from author Bruce Pickworth, a former teacher at our school. He introduced his book The godwits to students in Class 23, and all of Stage 2 and Stage 3.
Each year, UK department store, John Lewis, hires a team to create a special ad for the Christmas season. These ads are excellent examples of persuasive visual texts.
John Lewis Christmas advert 2016 – #BustertheBoxer
Each year, UK department store, John Lewis, hires a team to create a special ad for the Christmas season. These ads are excellent examples of persuasive visual texts.
Yesterday, our school participated in ALIA’s National Simultaneous Storytime. Each Stage gathered in groups around the school at 11am (simultaneously with schools all over Australia) to share the picture book, The Brothers Quibble by Aaron Blabey!
The Brothers Quibble
The Brothers Quibble [Auslan version]
Aaron Blabey – Picture book maker [Story Box Library]
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.
This back panel was left unpainted deliberately. Note the yellow plastic ladder emerging from the chimney hole.
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:
Here is a new PhotoPeach digital slideshow which archives some of the photos and craftwork of this year’s K-2 Chinese New Year celebrations:
Year of the Horse at Penrith PS
The inclement weather on Friday gave Class 1HB an additional lesson in the school library, so we brought out the collection of puppets and brainstormed a new digital story:
The Stage 1 students are already deep into their plans for celebrating Chinese New Year. Above is a PhotoPeach slideshow of our school’s first annual dragon parade, way back in 2005. It’s always a startling start to the concept of K-2 assemblies for the newly-arrived Kindergarten students!