Year One

Koala Lou Writing

In Year One, we have been learning how to write from authors who write amazing works. This term we have been looking at Mem Fox’s wonderful book Koala Lou. By analysing the emotions of the characters, we were able to identify why the characters took the actions they did, and the effect this had on the overall story. From this book, we chose the beginning and ending to deeply analyse and use as a model for our own writing. 

The first step in applying Mem Fox’s great ideas to our own, was completing a Language Orientation. During this lesson we unpacked why Mem Fox specifically chose the words she did, the effect these had on the reader, and the purpose they served within the passage. We were also able to apply our knowledge of parts of speech and colour code the words according to if they were nouns, verbs, or adjectives.

Now that we were confident in our understanding of why Mem Fox chose the words she did, we were able to Transform her passage into our own! We played around with the sentence to understand which parts we had to keep and which parts could be swapped. This was lots of fun! Then we brainstormed words we would like to use instead, and had a go rewriting the sentence as our own. 

Next was to put this together and follow Mem Fox’s pattern to write our own Patterned pieces of writing. 

We had successfully learnt how to write a fantastic beginning of a story by learning from what Mem Fox had done. Next, we had to learn how to write an ending that was just as entertaining so we repeated the process for the final passage in Koala Lou. 

Finally, we had the skills, language, and ideas to put everything together and write our own story, following the example that Mem Fox had set. We wrote about all kids of different animals and had a great time putting all the pieces together!

Matilda Hewett, Mahli Hill, Amy McDonald, Macalie Vlah and Serena Walker

The Year One Team