Thursday 3 April 2014

'On the Way Home' Year 3 Learning Sequence.

This month we have special guest blogger Helen Smith, Curriculum Leader and year three teacher at Kalgoorlie Primary School, sharing her 'On the Way Home' learning sequence for year three.

Year three have been working very hard on writing narratives this term. It’s quite a skill to plan a story with rounded characters, a convincing setting, create a conflict and then resolve it! We have read lots of short stories and dissected their structure in order for our students to understand how narratives work.

We used ‘On the Way Home’ by Jill Murphy as one of our texts to help our students plan and write their own narratives. The premise of this book is very simple: a girl, Clare, has hurt her knee and on her way home several of her friends stop her to ask how she did it. The genius is that Clare tells a different tall tale to each of her friends to explain the bad knee, and the story is populated by traditional fairy tale characters, aliens, gorillas and crocodiles as the stories become more and more fanciful. The language is sparse, but full of alliterative adjectives and well-chosen verbs so there are many opportunities for covering those language objectives in the AC.

The stories told by Clare make an excellent skeleton for the students to flesh out with their own ideas and the subject matter is familiar enough for them to draw on their own experiences. We had fun writing our ‘On the Way Home’ stories, and they made great scripts for the students to make some excellent movies on the iPads using ‘PuppetPals’. Check out the planning for this unit of work along with the success criteria which we used to mark the writing.

On the Way Home Learning Sequence

Success Indicators Rubric

On the Way Home - Adjectives activity

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