At the beginning of last term, Mr. Josh’s class embarked on a literary journey that might just produce the next budding author or illustrator of Port Noarlunga Primary School (shout out to Jack Joseph Payne Gibson).
In literacy throughout the rest of the year, a few of our goals will be to improve handwriting/sentence writing, have a sound understanding of linking phonemes to graphemes and beginning to learn about parts of speech (nouns, verbs and adjectives). By creating our own stories we have found that this has been a fun and creative way to combine all these elements and have a finished product at the end that we can be very proud of and share with and read to our families and friends.
We started last term by learning about the different parts of a narrative. The class discussed the characters and setting of a story and the different elements of a plot. We dissected the beginning, middle and end of a narrative and identified what the complication and resolution are in a story. Once students had been able to find these key elements in narratives we read in class, it was time to apply our knowledge and try our hand at becoming the author and illustrator of our own texts.
Each time we start a text we begin by brainstorming who the characters of our story will be and draw them so we can visualise who the book is about. Students then decide on the setting of their story and draw their characters in their chosen setting. We have been learning how important planning is in the lead up to writing our story so our next step is to storyboard the introduction, complication, and resolution in our workbooks. Once these first three steps have been completed it is then on to producing our book.
Throughout the process students are working on adding context and detail to their stories and learning the importance of showing the reader what is happening both in the pictures that they draw and the words that they use to tell their story. We create a front cover and have at least one page for each element of our completed storyboard. We are in the process of finding ways that we can add pages, providing the reader with more detailed information about our character and setting and how and why characters resolve the problem in the story. Students are excited to share their thoughts and ideas about what has happened to their characters and the problems that they find themselves in which has produced some outstanding stories so far.
It has been so much fun to see the creative process that students go through and how already students have come so far with their book making. We hope that we can share some of our stories with you throughout the year and that you enjoy reading them as much as we have enjoyed creating them.
Happy reading,
Mr. Josh’s Class
