Wednesday 9 March 2016

Bringing the story to life...

Thursday 10th March 2016

Bringing the story to life...

This week was one of my favourite weeks of the year as we celebrated Book Week at our school. As a Year Three Class Teacher, I feel that the Horrid Henry series by Francesca Simon are a perfect range of stories to focus on the during the week. The links with school and family issues are perfect and the language used in the text is very appropriate for children aged 7-9 years old. The outcome of my whole week was for the children to write a recount of what had happened over the week and for this information to be sent to the local police for investigation. The children also wrote character descriptions for the main character 'Horrid Henry'. Each character in the series has a name with an adjective placed in front, which promotes great vocabulary development for the students. E.g. Perfect Peter, Moody Margaret, Sour Susan. 


On the first day of the week the children returned from break time to find the classroom completely destroyed with tables upside down, displays ripped off the walls and the children's school bags completely empty. The children were in complete shock, but there were some clues around the room which some children spotted. I placed some UK coins in the classroom, as well as a London travel card and my own passport with a Horrid Henry passport page attached. The children wanted to take finger prints of each child and try and match it up to the coins. Using the App 'Mood Scan' I took the finger prints of all the children in the class. We then created an evidence wall of everything we had found so far and interrogated some of the children. At the early stages the children were unsure if it was me, one of the other children or even Horrid Henry. The 'Hot Seating' type activity was excellent and the children asked some wonderful questions...

Where were you between 8am and 9,30am?

Have you ever been to England? 

Have you seen anyone acting suspicious around the school today? 

After this the children took their Ipads around the school to find more clues, whilst also interviewing many teachers and students. On their return to the classroom they found out that Horrid Henry had emailed the class. Over the next two days emails were going back and forth between Horrid Henry and the students. All of this was to raise the profile of Book Week, but more importantly to bring the stories to life. The children wrote their own recounts of the week and they ended up being the best pieces of writing they had done all year! The vocabulary used, the understanding of the situation  and their ability to write in event order was excellent. We sent all recounts off to the local police, so that Horrid Henry can never do this to a school again. 

It was a truly remarkable week and one that we will all remember for a very long time...


All my planning and resources can be found at:

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/boltoncharlie

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Enjoy!

Global Teacher