Showing posts with label story mountain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story mountain. Show all posts

Saturday, September 21, 2013

{ Traditional tales }

Finally the open days at school are over. It is so difficult to teach when families walk into your class and you have to pass over to a teaching assistant to pick up exactly where you stopped. We had three days of this...and on the third day we had 19 families, 60 people in total!! Poor kiddos were a bit like fishes in a fish bowl with everyone staring at them and expecting them to be quiet and engaged in work independently. They did so well :-) 

We did get in a little bit of literacy this week which was a follow up from last week. We have been looking a traditional tales ( I know a few people from America read this, but I don't know what you call these stories, maybe someone could enlighten me :-) ) 


We looked at our story mountain and going over what happens at various stops along our climb. They really liked the analogy of writing/reading a story being like climbing a mountain. 
We talked about how traditional tales start and had a look at different stories to check that we were right. This was great to do because my little ones always struggle with writing and spelling 'Once upon a time' and this reinforced it. 


We thought a bit about our character (Goldilocks) and thought of some character traits for her. We discussed how yellow hair and pink dress are not character traits but adjectives to describe parts if the character. Then in the next lesson we also looked at adjectives which lead us into our next task.


We created wanted posters about the Wolf in Goldilocks to help my (fake) police officer sister find him. We talked a lot about how we need to use descriptive words to help the police find this wolf or it would be too hard. Instead of,  'he is a wolf' they were writing, 'He is a tall wolf with long furry ears and eyes as big as dinner plates. He has a wet, black nose and teeth that are sharp and pointy.' :)


Saturday, September 14, 2013

{ Camera juggling }


First of all an apology. I have got to get better at taking pictures. The problem in class is that I want to take pictures on my iPad or my camera but I have to use my school camera for any photos that go onto our school website so juggling three cameras hasn't been easy. 

This week in literacy we have been looking at traditional tales. We started off by retelling the story using puppets that I got on Early learning headquarters, the kids loved these! They retold the story sooo well using time connectives of course. Then will be moving on to character traits...ill be honest, I am pulling my hair out at this but I think we will get there in the end!

Next week I won't be teaching too much because we have school open days in the mornings and the kids are meant to be working quietly and independently so that I am free to chat. In reception, year one and year two we work through early English skills so I will be leaving them to get on with that. 



Any ideas for independent activities for 5 year olds to do quietly for 2 hours?