'Mallee Sky' is written by Jodi Toering and illustrated by Tannya Harricks. This is a beautiful book about the effect of drought and climate change in the Mallee region in Victoria. The emotive, figurative language used within this text creates imagery for students to explore life in the country during a time of little rain and the major impact it can have on people's livelihoods.
This activity pack includes activities to support this text, which allow students to discuss, make connections, study the grammatical features and understand the connection between the land and life. There are various activities that can be adapted for various learning levels.
Included in this pack:
* Brainstorm activity- students create vocabulary lists to describe aspects of various skies and landscapes.
* Prediction activity- students can predict what may happen in this story and make connections with things in their own world.
* Compare and Contrast activities- students can explore the similarities and differences between the Mallee region and where they live, as well as between drought and rain.
* Visual Literacy- students reflect on colours and illustrations and think about the emotions and mood these create.
* Noun Groups- students can use noun picture cards to create a noun group- with a determiner, adjective and noun.
Descriptive Language activities- students study phrases from the text and explain how they feel when reading them. Another reflection sheet allows students to draw the image created and what the phrase means.
* Cause and Effect activity- students can discuss and sort parts of the text that illustrate rain or no rain. This can be a cut and paste activity or used to sort multiple times.
* Prepositions- students sort phrases from the text into what type of preposition it contains- time, place or direction.
* Alliteration- students can add adjectives or adverbs to a noun or verb to create alliterative sentences.
* Personification- students think about the images created by the use of personification in the text. They can also choose a noun picture card to go with a human characteristics verb to create their own sentences with personification.
Australian Curriculum content descriptions
Identify the parts of a simple sentence that represent ‘What’s happening?’, ‘What state is being described?’, ‘Who or what is involved?’ and the surrounding circumstances (ACELA1451)
Explore differences in words that represent people, places and things (nouns, including pronouns), happenings and states (verbs), qualities (adjectives) and details such as when, where and how (adverbs) (ACELA1452)
Compare different kinds of images in narrative and informative texts and discuss how they contribute to meaning (ACELA1453)
Discuss characters and events in a range of literary texts and share personal responses to these texts, making connections with students' own experiences (ACELT1582)
Respond to texts drawn from a range of cultures and experiences (ACELY1655)
Recreate texts imaginatively using drawing, writing, performance and digital forms of communication (ACELT1586)
Understand that different types of texts have identifiable text structures and language features that help the text serve its purpose (ACELA1463)
Understand that the meaning of sentences can be enriched through the use of noun groups/phrases and verb groups/phrases and prepositional phrases (ACELA1493)
Understand how texts are made cohesive through language features, including word associations, synonyms, and antonyms (ACELA1464)
Listen to, recite and perform poems, chants, rhymes and songs, imitating and inventing sound patterns including alliteration and rhyme (ACELT1585)