P5-7 are enjoying reading the novel ‘Wonder’ by R. J. Palacio.  The story is about August Pullman, a ten-year-old boy who suffers from severe birth defects, as he navigates school life.  Critical essays on the text will follow soon.  For this artwork we used watercolours and ink to make our own Wonder-inspired self portraits.

The nursery children love to recreate the story “ We’re Going On A Bear Hunt” whenever we are out on walks in the community, so we decided to set up an activity in the  nursery garden to explore and extend our involvement further.

We used a variety of natural resources to try to create the  grass, the river, mud, a forest, snow and a cave.The wooden house was turned into a cave with camouflage netting and black materials inside to create the  deep, dark cave.

The boys are able to  recall the story word for word without needing to look at the book.

The boys had great fun exploring the sensory areas with their shoes on and were then very brave to explore the story in their bare feet. This activity not only focused on language and literacy, the  activity promoted imaginative play, turn taking, team work, confidence building, gross motor skills, problem solving skills, risk awareness and sensory engagement.

Luckily the Bears were very friendly and joined us  on our adventures for the rest of the day.

This week there was great excitement in the nursery when the boys discovered that pirates had visited the garden through the night.  Inside a bottle from the bottom of the ocean the boys found a letter and a map, which had been left by the pirates.

The map gave us visual clues that led us to familiar landmarks in our environment.  The pirates had left numbers at each of the landmarks and those numbers led us into the school forest.

We were so excited to finally find an ‘X’ marked on the ground with cutlasses.  The boys worked hard to dig and dig and they eventually found a treasure box buried underground.  To our surprise, the pirates had left the boys some treasure to take home.

This was part of our pirate topic this term.  We have been learning about numbers, our environment, expressive languages, drama, problem solving, teamwork and being safe in our community.

P5-7 are reading the novel Wonder written by R. J. Palacio and have been answering reading questions about the text.

Today they were leading the learning by working with partners to set their own reading questions.  We began by talking about what reading questions are designed to assess:

Then they identified specific question stems:

Here are the questions they created:

We shared our questions and had an interesting discussion about what makes a good question.  The next task will be to answer the questions…

Yesterday, at the forest, P5-7 were doing more work on measure.  This time they had to work with a partner and follow written instructions for measuring a tree.  Afterwards, they all agreed that it was more difficult than they had anticipated.  However, we  had an interesting discussion about the vocabulary used in the instructions as well as considering the factors which may have affected the accuracy of our measurements.  Well done everyone for persevering.