A Mouse Took a Stroll Through the Deep, Dark Wood...
In the second term of school, my students spend six weeks studying an author. This year we studied the beautiful works of Julia Donaldson. American friends, if you are not familiar with Julia Donaldson (I wasn't before moving overseas to teach), I highly recommend coming to LOVE her work--because she is a master of all things expression.
Her books are delightful and often take on the traditional aspects of storytelling--incorporating great rhyme, repetition, and easily followed story arcs. Julia Donaldson also puts many of her books to music, dance, and even sign! Our class will be performing "Monkey Puzzle" a song sign in makaton for our upcoming concert! (more on that later).
We completed many projects during this Author Study, but one of my favorite pieces was our Monsters of the Forest.
Our class read The Gruffalo (perhaps her most famous piece of work). In this story a supposedly fictional monster terrifies the creatures of the forest and a clever mouse finds a way to avoid becoming lunch.
After reading this story twice (rereading stories is a good thing friends!) our class decided to act out the story with our bodies. We traveled to the Learning Lab for this lesson. Every child got a part. Some were trees, some were logs, and some created the foxes' underground home by sitting in a circle. Some students acted the part of characters. Because the story has such great repetition, students were able to have lines like a chorus. Sorry that this photo only shows me (student's rights to privacy have to be respected!)
For this retelling, I played the role of the mouse, because this character drives the story and it's easier to keep the momentum and interest of the activity going with a teacher or strong student performer to guide it. Older children would be able to assume a lead role easier.
After this activity, we discussed the characters of the story. It can be difficult to get young children to describe the attributes of characters. To help this process along, we used the prompt of 'is, has, and can' to aide in verbal description.
These prompts really get kids talking and focusing on description. Afterwards we discussed attributes in general. We know that an attribute is sometimes something that can be seen with our eyes. Sometimes it is something that has to be felt from the words of an author. We sorted our list of attributes into things we can see, and things that we can feel from the author's words. This is a bit abstract for young children--but if you take your preexisting list, you'll be surprised how they can latch onto the concept. Repeating the same process with different literature can also help children to understand how these concepts can be applied to all literature we read.
In doing this, we are attempting to convey that authors make choices. They make choices in their illustrations and they make choices in the words that they use. They make decisions about characters.
After studying the Grufflo character, we were ready to make our own Monsters of the Forest. We set about drawing our characters with marker first. Later we used watercolors to fill in the pictures.
After we created a visual representation of our characters, we set about writing. For some children, writing involves working in a one on one conference setting. Some children write in leveled groups with teacher support. Some children write on their own with the occasional help of my TA. Some children are working on their English (phonics have not yet come) and they dictate their words to me. Differentiation and working within a child's zone of proximal development is KEY to good teaching.
During our writing session, students were asked to consider the words 'is', 'has', and 'can' to describe the characteristics of their monster.
To display this in the classroom, students created trees from brown rectangles and green tissue paper. This way, our bulletin board was completely student made--I only added the description of their work to the final display.
These works are ready to go home. You'll notice that I add a written description to each piece. This let's parents know about our processes. Communicating pedagogy practices with parents is KEY to having great working relationships.
Her books are delightful and often take on the traditional aspects of storytelling--incorporating great rhyme, repetition, and easily followed story arcs. Julia Donaldson also puts many of her books to music, dance, and even sign! Our class will be performing "Monkey Puzzle" a song sign in makaton for our upcoming concert! (more on that later).
We completed many projects during this Author Study, but one of my favorite pieces was our Monsters of the Forest.
Our class read The Gruffalo (perhaps her most famous piece of work). In this story a supposedly fictional monster terrifies the creatures of the forest and a clever mouse finds a way to avoid becoming lunch.
After reading this story twice (rereading stories is a good thing friends!) our class decided to act out the story with our bodies. We traveled to the Learning Lab for this lesson. Every child got a part. Some were trees, some were logs, and some created the foxes' underground home by sitting in a circle. Some students acted the part of characters. Because the story has such great repetition, students were able to have lines like a chorus. Sorry that this photo only shows me (student's rights to privacy have to be respected!)
For this retelling, I played the role of the mouse, because this character drives the story and it's easier to keep the momentum and interest of the activity going with a teacher or strong student performer to guide it. Older children would be able to assume a lead role easier.
After this activity, we discussed the characters of the story. It can be difficult to get young children to describe the attributes of characters. To help this process along, we used the prompt of 'is, has, and can' to aide in verbal description.
In doing this, we are attempting to convey that authors make choices. They make choices in their illustrations and they make choices in the words that they use. They make decisions about characters.
After studying the Grufflo character, we were ready to make our own Monsters of the Forest. We set about drawing our characters with marker first. Later we used watercolors to fill in the pictures.
After we created a visual representation of our characters, we set about writing. For some children, writing involves working in a one on one conference setting. Some children write in leveled groups with teacher support. Some children write on their own with the occasional help of my TA. Some children are working on their English (phonics have not yet come) and they dictate their words to me. Differentiation and working within a child's zone of proximal development is KEY to good teaching.
During our writing session, students were asked to consider the words 'is', 'has', and 'can' to describe the characteristics of their monster.
To display this in the classroom, students created trees from brown rectangles and green tissue paper. This way, our bulletin board was completely student made--I only added the description of their work to the final display.
These works are ready to go home. You'll notice that I add a written description to each piece. This let's parents know about our processes. Communicating pedagogy practices with parents is KEY to having great working relationships.
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