Today our school has a fantastic
Year 3 Literature Lesson to share with you!
The details of the lesson and the way it links to the Australian Curriculum as are follows:
Learning Area: English
Focus Strand: Literature
Focus Sub Strands: Literature and Context - Discuss texts in which characters, events and settings are portrayed in different ways, and speculate on the authors' reasons
Responding to Literature - Draw connections between personal experiences and the worlds of texts, and share responses with others
The text is called "Just Another Ordinary Day" by Rod Clement.
The teacher's lesson plan is below. You can download this lesson plan below:
Further notes on the lesson to support the plan
Session 1: Teacher reads text to students as a "blind reading" - students hear the text but do not see the illustrations. Following this, the students are given a blank piece of paper with one section of the text written on the page. The student's are required to illustrate the page to match the text as they see it in their mind, drawing on personal experience. Teacher uses this to create a class book. Teacher shares book with whole class and discusses aspects of illustrations. For example: Why did you do draw it that way?
Here are some examples of the student's work:
Session 2: Compare student illustrations to author's illustrations. Here are the two author illustrations for the text that was used above:
PMI as a class regarding the preference between their illustration and the author's. Here is the PMI that was conducted on the Smartboard.
Session 3: InsideOutsideCircle is a cooperative learning structure. Please see the comprehension cards for this task below by clicking on the link and downloading in Google Docs.
Session 4: Students independently answer written comprehension questions regarding the text. Please see the written component for this task below by clicking on the link and downloading in Google Docs.
Extension Task: Make a class version of "Our Ordinary Day". Using First Steps strategy of text innovation, the teacher scaffolded the writing of a class version of the story using student names and the daily schedule of the class as the events in the story. This was undertaken on the Smartboard. Each student was responsible for illustrating their page using a style similar to the author. This session links further to the
English Literature content in the Sub Strand of Creating Literature: Create imaginative texts based on characters, settings and events from students’ own and other cultures using visual features, for example perspective, distance and angle. Here is a sample of student work in relation to this task. You can see how the student has used the style of the author's illustration.
Teacher reflection: The activities were creative ways of meeting the content descriptions. A range of achievement levels and understanding was easily viewed. Following the comprehension task, it was clear the students needed more exposure to inferential questions and answers. The teachers will be targeting character traits in terms of appearance and personality.
We thank the students for giving us permission to share their work!
Please feel free to use this lesson sequence in your class! We would love to hear how it went!
