MARC Library
Unit of Work: Term 3
2013
MIDDLE/UPPER PRIMARY
CBCA SHORTLISTED BOOKS: RELATED ACTIVITIES BOOK WEEK CELEBRATIONS
Learning Focus
(AusVELs used as the basis for all planning)
English
Literacy
Sub Strand: Interpreting, analysing, evaluating
· Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning to expand content knowledge, integrating and linking ideas and analysing and evaluating texts.
· Identify the audience and purpose of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts.
Sub Strand: Interacting with others
· Use interaction skills, including active listening behaviours and communicate in a clear, coherent manner using a variety of everyday and learned vocabulary and appropriate tone, pace, pitch and volume.
· Interpret ideas and information in spoken texts and listen for key points in order to carry out tasks and use information to share and extend ideas and information.
· Listen to and contribute to conversations and discussions to share information and ideas and negotiate in collaborative situations.
Literature
Sub Strand: Responding to literature
· Draw connections between personal experiences and the world of texts, and share responses with others.
Sub Strand: Examining literature
· Discuss how language is used to describe settings in texts, and explore how the settings shape the events and influence the mood of the narrative.
· Discuss how authors and illustrators make stories exciting, moving and absorbing and hold readers’ interest by using various techniques, for example character development and plot tension.
Language
Sub Strand: Expressing and developing ideas
· Understand that verbs represent different processes (doing, thinking, saying and relating) and that these processes are anchored in time through tense.
· Learn extend and technical vocabulary and ways of expressing opinion including modal verbs and adverbs.
The Arts
Creating and Making
· Select, combine and experiment with ways of using a range of art elements, skills, techniques and processes, to explore art ideas sourced from their imagination and from their own and other cultures.
Years 3-6
Lesson 1Collection of CBCA shortlisted books for 2013 / Learning Intention:
For students to give meaning to a phrase and provide a visual depiction.
Success Criteria:
Be able to create a front cover for this term’s unit of work relating to the Book Week theme: ‘Read Across the Universe’. / Lesson Plan
Make a list on the whiteboard of ideas that give some meaning to the word universe.
Whole Class Discussion
What is the universe?
What do you think ‘Read Across the Universe’ means?
Show the students the range of CBCA shortlisted books for 2013. Read the blurbs and give a brief account of each fiction and non-fiction book in the selection.
What book would you take on your intergalactic travels? Explain why.
Task
Create a front cover for our unit of work relating to Book Week: ‘Read Across the Universe’.
Use charcoal for the background and oil pastels to add detail. / Requirements
Collection of CBCA shortlisted books for 2013
Workbooks
Charcoal
Oil pastels
Lesson 2
Python
Written by Christopher Cheng
Illustrated by Mark Jackson / Learning Intention:
For students to use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning to expand own content knowledge.
For students to interpret ideas and information in spoken texts and listen for key points in order to complete a given task.
Success Criteria:
Accurately complete a graphic organiser included detailed information about the characteristics of a python: type of animal, body covering, reproduction, hunting its prey and habitat. / Lesson Plan
Whole Class Discussion
What can you see on the front cover?
What words best describe the python?
What do you think it is doing?
What do you know about pythons?
Make a list of the students’ prior knowledge on the whiteboard.
Read ‘Python’ by Christopher Cheng
Whole Class Discussion
What did you notice about this information book? What were its special features?
What did you learn about pythons that you didn’t know already?
What else would you like to know about them?
Refer back to the list of prior knowledge and discuss the information already listed. Make changes and add any new knowledge.
Task 1
Complete a graphic organiser about a python. Include detailed a response to each of the following characteristics: type of animal, skin, habitat, reproduction, hunting its prey.
Use the Internet to research additional information and include this in the graphic organiser.
Task 2
Use patterned paper to create the effect of scales on an outlined picture of a python. / Requirements
Python
By Christopher Cheng
Patterned paper
Picture of the outline of a python
Graphic organiser-
Pythons
Glue sticks
Textas
Access to the Internet
Lesson 3
Tom the Outback Mailman
Written by Kristin Weidenbach
Illustrated by Timothy Ide / Learning Intention:
For students to understand that visualizing can be more than just looking.
For students to identify the nouns, verbs, adjectives and the gaps and silences which can found in a visual image.
Success Criteria:
Select a book from the CBCA shortlisted collection. Visually deconstruct the front cover and identify the nouns, verbs and adverbs, listing these on a given table. Identify the gaps and silences and provide a written description of the inferences that can be made from the front cover. / Lesson Plan
Show students the front cover of ‘Tom the Outback Mailman’.
Whole Class Discussion
What do you notice about the front cover?
What can you see?
Who is the main character?
What is he doing?
What else is happening?
How would describe the things you can see in the image on the front cover?
Would you like to live in the outback? Why? Why not?
Whole Class Activity
Create a whole class table of nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Whole Class Discussion
What are the gaps and the silences in the front cover? What inferences can you make?
Show students a YouTube clip of Tom Cruze giving an interview at the age of 94. Show a YouTube clip of an ABC News Broadcast on the day that Tom Cruze passed away. It provides footage of his time as an outback mailman. Discuss.
Task 1
Select a book from the CBCA shortlisted collection for 2013. Visually deconstruct the front cover and identify the nouns, verbs and adverbs, listing these on a given table. Identify the gaps and silences and write down the inferences that can be made from the front cover.
Task 2
Design your own front cover for Tom the Outback Mailman. / Requirements
Tom the Outback Mailman by Kristin Weidenbach
Large A3 coloured copy of the front cover of Tom the Outback Mailman
Access to the Internet
Student Worksheet:
What’s in a Front Cover? Let’s Discover!
Lesson 4
‘Other Brother’
By Simon French / Learning Intention:
For students to draw connections between personal experiences and the world of texts, and share responses with others.
For students to interpret ideas and information in spoken texts and listen for key points in order to carry out tasks.
Success Criteria:
Be able to ‘put yourself in the shoes of either character’: Bon or Kieran. If you are imagining that you are Bon, write a letter to Kieran to inform him of how you are feeling about his treatment of you. If you are Kieran, write a letter to Bon stating your feelings about him coming into your life. / Lesson Plan
Whole Class Discussion
Discuss this idiom with the students:
You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family......
What does this mean?
Some things you can choose, but others you cannot, so you have to try to make the best of what you have where you have no choice.
Introduce the students to ‘Other Brother’ by Simon French. Explain that it addresses topical issues of bullying, acceptance and friendships into a sensitive story. Read page 7 aloud.
Whole Class Discussion
Did you get a positive or negative image from the text? What words or sentences give you that impression?
Would you react as Kieran reacted or would you react differently?
Read the last paragraph on page 8 and the first paragraph on page 9.
Whole Class Discussion
How is Bon described?
Did you get a positive or negative image of Bon? Which words or sentences give you this impression?
Read pages 140-141 where Mason and Luke put together a plot to bully Bon, Kieran’s cousin.
Whole Class Discussion
What should Kieran do?
What do you think Kieran will actually do?
What would you do?
What could Kieran have done to prevent this bullying behaviour?
How do you think Bon will feel? How does Kieran feel?
Task
Encourage students to ‘put themselves in the shoes of either character’: Bon or Kieran. If they imagine they are Bon, they are to write a letter to Kieran to inform him of how they are feeling about his bullying. If they pretend to be Kieran, they are to write a letter to Bon stating their feelings about him coming into their life. / Requirements
Other Brother
By Simon French
Paper for letter writing
Lesson 5
BOOK WEEK CELEBRATIONS
WHOLE SCHOOL BOOK WEEK PARADE
Students are encouraged to come dressed up as their favourite book character or something related to the BOOK WEEK theme-
‘Read Across the Universe’.
Bring along their favourite book to share- a book they would choose to take with them if on their intergalactic travels.
Announce winners of BOOK WEEK parade from each year level.
Announce winners of the CBCA shortlisted books for each section in 2013.
Book Week Quiz
CLASSROOM BOOK WEEK ACTIVITY
Make a placemat about the BOOK WEEK theme of ‘Read Across the Universe’.
Give each student an A3 piece of white cover paper, a cardboard cut-out of an astronaut and a variety of patterned papers.
Use the side of a black crayon to create a dark, space-like background on the placemat. Paste a photo of their face on the head of the astronaut. Use tin foil to cover the suit of the astronaut. Paste this on the placemat. Add detail using crayons. Make sure their favourite book title is included somewhere on the placemat and the BOOK Week theme must also be highlighted.
Lesson 6
With Nan
Written by Tania Cox
Illustrated by
Karen Blair / Learning Intention:
For students to select, combine and experiment with ways of using a range of art elements, skills, techniques and processes, to explore art ideas sourced from their imagination.
Success Criteria:
Students to be able to create a picture using a fine liner outline of objects from the environment as the basis. After drawing the outline of the objects they find, the students are to look at the shape and decide what they see and create something. They are to then select water-based paints, oil pastels or crayons to add colour. / Lesson Plan
Whole Class Discussion
What type of things do you do with your Nan or Grandma? What do you enjoy doing most with your Nan or Grandma?
Read ‘With Nan’ by Tania Cox
Whole Class Discussion
How do we know this story is set in Australia?
How important are the illustrations to the success of this picture storybook? Why?
What has Karen Blair used when illustrating Nan?
Why is this effective?
Silhouettes are featured throughout this book. How has Karen Blair created this effect?
Task
Students are to gather some objects from the schoolyard, e.g. leaves, stones, feathers, etc. They are to outline these objects on an A# sheet of cartridge paper using a black fine liner. After drawing the outline of the objects they find, the students are to look at the shapes and decide what they see and then create something. They are to then select water-based paints, oil pastels or crayons to add colour. They are to then outline the objects in their picture with charcoal.
Can relate pictures to theme of ‘Read Across the Universe’, e.g. create rockets out of leaf outline. / Requirements
With Nan
By Tania Cox
Objects from the environment-
feathers, leaves, stones, etc.
Black fine liners
Crayons/Oil pastels
Water-based paints
Charcoal
A3 Cartridge paper
Lesson 7
Tanglewood
Written by Margaret Wild
Illustrated by
Vivien Goodman / Learning Intention:
For students to identify the audience and the purpose of an imaginative text.
Discuss how authors and illustrators make stories moving and absorbing and hold readers’ interest by various techniques.
Success Criteria:
Students will be able to actively participate in a discussion about author’s intended audience and the purpose of the Tanglewood.
Students will be able to describe how the illustrator made this book come alive.
Students will be able to create six small drawings echoing the seagull’s memories of Tanglewood. / Lesson Plan
Whole Class Discussion
Look at the front cover. What is Tanglewood?
Who do you think might be the main character in this story?
How has Vivienne Goodman created the contrast of dark and light on the front cover? Why do you think she has done this?
Read Tanglewood by Margaret Wild
At the completion of the story, explain that Margaret Wild portrays lots of emotions in this story. Give the students 5 minutes to write down their thoughts about the story or any questions they may have. Students share their thoughts with the class.
Whole Class Discussion
How do you think Tanglewood felt in the story?
What type of audience was Margaret Wild targeting when writing this story?
Tnaglewood’s emotions changed throughout the story. How did Vivienne Goodman help create the emotions in this story through her illustrations?
How do you know Tanglewood had a determination to live on? Explain that sometimes we feel sad and lonely but these feeling won’t last forever.
At the novel’s end, there is a strong sense of hope for Tanglewood’s future. What do you think of the book’s ending?
Task
Students are to create six small drawings, echoing the seagull’s memories of Tanglewood.
Use coloured pencils to colour drawings and outline with a black fine liner. / Requirements
Tanglewood
By Margaret Wild
Worksheet Activity
Black fine liners/Coloured Pencils
Lesson 8
It’s a Miroocool!
Written by Christine Harris
Illustrated by Ann James
Peggy
Written by Anna Walker
The Terrible Suitcase
Written by Emma Allen
Illustrated by
Freya Blackwood
Too Many Elephants in this House
Written by Ursula Dubosarsky
Illustrated by Andrew Joyner / Learning Intention:
For students to discuss how authors and illustrators make stories exciting, moving and absorbing.
For students to listen to and contribute to conversations and discussions to share information and ideas and negotiate in collaborative situations.
Success Criteria:
Students to be able to contribute actively to a whole class discussion about their favourite CBCA shortlisted book for 2013. For students to give examples of why they have chosen a particular book and explain what the author and illustrator have done to influence their choice.
Complete a BOOK REVIEW. / Lesson Plan
Read a range of picture storybooks that have been shortlisted by the CBCA for 2013:
· It’s a Miroocool!
· Peggy
· The Terrible Suitcase
· Too Many Elephants
Whole Class Discussion
What is your favourite shortlisted book for 2013? Why have you chosen this book? What has the author and illustrator done to influence your choice? What makes the book work for you?
Task
Complete a BOOK REVIEW. / Requirements
It’s a Miroocool!
By Tania Cox
Peggy
By Anna Walker
The Terrible Suitcase
By Emma Allen
Too Many Elephants in the House
By Ursula Dubosarsky
BOOK REVIEW sheet
MARC Resources used to complete this Unit of Work