The Gruffalo Comes to Križ

I was delighted to discover that the kids at the Križ primary school had yet to discover the gleeful tale of The Gruffalo. So, a new children’s literature project was born.

We started the journey by looking at the story’s incredibly intelligent heroic mouse and watching a part of the beautiful animated adventure.

We then went on to examine the meeting of Mouse and Fox by pinpointing some of the scene’s features and by reliving how Mouse had described the gruesome Gruffalo.

I am really looking forward to our next meeting. 🙂

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Getting to know a certain red dragon. :-)

As a part of our Halloween book project a number of classes this week are exploring the features of a red dragon which stars in our Halloween book choice.

This little dragon has big yellow eyes and sharp white horns. He has red scaly skin, but his wings are pink and his belly is white.

There are two versions of the worksheet, one for my younger learners, which includes labels for cutting and sticking, and one for slightly older children, which includes a number of ‘mastery questions’.

I hope that somebody else finds them useful.

Prehistoric Fiction: Tiny-rannosaurus

Our after school English club at Barcola started marvellously yesterday.  The fourth and fifth classes began their ‘Curiosity English’ course with a reading of ‘Tiny-rannosaurs’ by Nick Ward.

It was a great a read and the kids really enjoyed it. While reading the book on the interactive board, we used adhesive word labels to identify certain characters and features.

We then started exploring the story and its words a little deeper with the aid  of a few book inspired worksheets that I had created for the occasion.  We finished off our time with the children working in teams to spell Tiny-rannosaurus words with letter tiles.

There will be more Tiny-rannosaurus exploration next week, as well as starting a project looking at real prehistoric life.

The Wild Ones in Općina

Today I finished a five morning exploration of Maurice Sendak‘s ‘Where the wild things are‘ with a bunch of ten teenage English language learners .  It was a a great week for me, I only hope that they thought likewise.

As well as reading, watching and sequencing the story in its entirety, we delved into it and tried to squeeze as much out of the book as we could. We used it to teach us the differences between real and imaginary worlds. We  took from it the meanings of  ‘making mischief’ and ‘wild rumpus’.  It inspired us to explore Earthly forests and animal coverings, sea voyage and ocean life, body parts of the most savage kind, and what we ourselves would do if we were all crowned kings and queens of the Wild Things.

To finish it all off, in a most wild and ethical way, we adopted a gray wolf through the World Wildlife Fund.