My daughter is LOVING 'I Went Walking' at the moment. It is a great read, but she loves it even more now she can read it TO me! I have read this to her since she was a baby, and it has a very similar pattern and rhythm as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, by Bill Martin, which we also love. I Went Walking is a modern Australian classic written by Sue Machin. If you have not got this in your home library, you should! The beautiful illustrations are done by Julie Vivas, and my US friends may be familiar with her work in Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge.
I have purchased a set of felt board characters from Felt Fun for this book. They make retelling the story lots of fun for my students. We can also work with ordinal numbers in maths, by talking about which animal came first, second etc
I found this little beauty yesterday! It is another Australian book called Wombat Went A' Walking, with beyond-superb illustrations by Lachlan Creagh. The story follows a familiar pattern of animals going on a journey, and collecting a new animal with each page.
Wombat begins walking and stops to cool his feet in the creek. He meets turtle... and the adventure begins. This book features SO MANY action words it would be perfect for starting a lesson or unit of work on verbs with your students. Lachlan's illustrations are PERFECT for bringing the action words on each page to life. Your students will gain a sense of the meaning of a verb, just by looking at these illustrations.
I always introduce verbs to my kindergarten students by challenging them to get up and move around the classroom. I tell them that 'jump' is a verb, because we can DO it, and 'clap' is a verb, because we can DO it...
'Chair' I tell them... "Computer" I tell them...... and we all laugh as they realise that they cannot 'chair' or 'computer" like we can 'run', 'skip', 'talk' and so on. We play a fun game of calling out words, and if they are action verbs they perform the action. If the are 'things' or nouns, we pretend to take a photo of them.
This book will now be my staple for introducing verbs and action words in the classroom, and playing this game.
Here are just some of the verbs I found in the book today with my daughter:
We also did a retell of the story with my collection of puppets. I have been collecting hand puppets for a long time, and buy them whenever I see them. The wombat and platypus are my favourites and I picked them up at Toronga Zoo last time we were there. The koala puppet was a dollar bargain at the dollar shop. Tim the Emu was named by my students on a school excursion I had with a kindergarten class back in 2006. He is very special!
Puppets are a wonderful tool for helping students to retell stories and think about the structure of the text.
Here is a close up of my wombat puppet... isn't he just too cute!
If you visit Australia, you simply must take the time to try to see some wombats, they are adorable... very sleepy, so you may have to wait around to see one come out of its burrow.
I made these writing worksheets to use with my daughter this week, and you are welcome to download them to use if you get the chance to share this wonderful story with your class. For my Australian friends, stop by your local Big W if you can and get it, I got mine yesterday for around $10. Awesome value!
Click on the image below to get the worksheets from google docs. Thanks to scrappindoodles for the lovely clipart.
A NSW font version is included in the file too!
