Foundation Class 

Using Books in Cross-Curricular Learning in the Prep Classroom

Books can be a powerful cross-curricular teaching tool to engage students in reading while teaching them about the world around them. Using the same book for multiple subjects can empower students to learn about different concepts that may not be taught just in literacy. Last week, the Prep class engaged in the storybook ‘The Snail and the Whale’ in a number of different learning areas. 

In our Literacy lessons, we were looking at the adjectives in the book, writing character descriptions, acting out the book (our favourite activity in literacy), unpacking the plot and exploring all the different settings encountered in the book.

In our Maths lessons, we counted all the animals and graphed them into a bar graph.

In our Integrated Studies lessons, we discussed how the snail was very small, but he helped save the whale. We then discussed our strengths and abilities and things we thought we could not do, but once we tried it, we managed to succeed just like the snail. 

In Digital Technologies, as a class we decided to plan and record a short video to report how the whale was saved in the book. We had a lot of fun making the video and it gave the students an insight of how a short movie can be made. 

We hope you enjoy the video. We have some budding actors and actresses waiting to be picked up by the talent scouts!

Make sure you have the volume turned up because the sound is quite poor!