How Important Is A Good Mentor Text?

As mentioned last term, we have a ‘Story of the Week’ in the Foundation classroom. A good language-rich storybook can be used in multiple ways. Last week our class integrated the ‘Story of the Week’ into our Literacy, Integrated Studies and Art.

Our Story of the Week was called 'Feathers for Phoebe' and below is how this lovely story was incorporated in our cross-curricular lessons.

In our Integrated Studies unit this term, the focus is ‘Fairness and Friendship’. The Preps have been learning about what makes a good friend. They have been also learning to listen with understanding and empathy. The Preps have been learning techniques to manage conflict and different social skills to use when working in a team and practising being friendly and not caving to peer pressure. In the photos below they had to write down what it meant to be a good friend. They shared their opinions with the class who listened and showed everyone respect.

The story ‘Feathers for Phoebe’, gave the Preps an understanding of many of these concepts, as Phoebe went to great lengths to become beautiful so she could be accepted and noticed, but in the end realised she has always been beautiful and should not let the peer pressure of her friends influence who she was.

For our writing, we used the book to help us to complete sentence stems and concentrate on our sentence structure. This was done by reading the book and learning about the different sentence types used in the book and trying to use this knowledge to create our own fantastic sentences.

Below are some samples of the fantastic writing the Preps produced for this text.

The Prep students were also very lucky to have Miss Kennedy complete a lesson relating to our ‘Story of the Week’, helping them create beautiful and elegant crests just like Phoebe.

The Preps looked at colours and different textures and patterns in their Art lesson, while making their colourful crests. The students enjoyed making their crests and parading and dancing around the classroom and outside just like Phoebe did in the book.

Arts