Welcome to Week 5 everyone and here’s our learning for Monday:

Today is Victoria’s 7th birthday! We wish her a very happy day.

 

 

Literacy: Shared Reading with Mrs Handforth

This week the children are exploring how authors/illustrators tell stories through the use of speech and thought bubbles. Over the next few days they will be making their own book using this method of storytelling.

During shared reading today we explored a couple of texts that use only speech and thought bubbles to tell a story. We explored further, looking at how the authors vary the colour of these bubbles to show the reader which character is speaking, and/or vary the size and shape to reflect how characters in the story are feeling.

We also paid attention to the use of capital letters (upper case letters) to convey strong emotions, such as anger,  excitement and frustration.

Furthermore, we discussed the authors’ use of punctuation – in particular, exclamation marks (!), ellipses (…) and interrobangs (!?!).

We began by exploring Can I Play Too? by author/illustrator, Mo Willems.

‘Gerald is careful. Piggie is not. Piggie cannot help smiling. Gerald can. Gerald and Piggie are best friends. In Can I Play Too? Gerald and Piggie meet a new snake friend who wants to join in a game of catch. But don’t you need arms to catch? Mo Willems’ Geisel Award-winning duo never fails to tickle readers of all ages. Like previous Elephant & Piggie Books, this adventure has been vetted by an early learning specialist and emerging learners themselves. It turns reading into play!’

Next we took a peek at I DON’T WANT TO BE A FROG by Dev Petty (author) and Mike Boldt (illustrator). The images and text in this story are more complex than in Mo Willem’s book (above).

Frog wants to be anything but a slimy, wet frog. A cat, perhaps. Or a rabbit. An owl? But when a hungry wolf arrives—a wolf who HATES eating frogs—our hero decides that maybe being himself isn’t so bad after all.

We also looked briefly at Anna Kang’s book, You Are (Not) Small, to illustrate how some authors use lines and text in lieu of a speech bubble. This can be a simpler way to use speech where characters say simple things and where the page does not contain too much speech.

 

Literacy: Book Making

The students began their books this morning. 

Numeracy with Mrs Papillo

The children continued their measurement learning this morning with the focus on length.  There were two activities; activity 1 involved the children using their reasoning skills and ordering Gingerbread Men according to how tall or short they were.  Activity 2 asked the children to measure objects in the classroom using a uniform unit.  Some children worked on the laptops today during numeracy and were asked to explore mathematics software.

 

 

 Mindful Yoga

We began the afternoon. with some mindful yoga courtesy of Cosmic Kids.

Religion with Mrs Papillo

This afternoon the children participated in prayer with a focus on Mary, reciting the Hail Mary and sharing personal prayers.  Then, with a partner the children worked on a word search and looked for words that describe Mary and the type of person she was.