This quality text is a celebration of family and explores the influences that contribute to growth and various stages of life.
This text was chosen as the 2022 ALIA National Simultaneous Storytime- to be shared across all education settings at the same time.
This activity pack includes activities to support this text, which allow students to discuss, comprehend, make connections and explore themes of family, culture and the various stages of life. There are activities that can be adapted and cater for Pre- Year 6.
Included:
*'Family Tree' activity. Students can identify their closest family members and draw or write about them.
*'Who is Important to me' activity. Students can identify various family or friends and express gratitude of why they are important to them. This can be scaffolded for younger students or written in detail by older students.
*'My Life' activity circle. Students think about and draw or write things they think have had a major influence in their life. They can think about influences within their family, within the community and other significant events that may have had an impact.
*'Stages of Life' activity. Students can draw or write about when they were at various stages in their life. They can think about a significant event or simply draw a picture of themselves. They can predict what they will look like or what they might be doing in the future stages of their life.
*'Build a Brick Wall' activity. This is an open-ended activity sheet where students can draw people, influences or events that have been building blocks in their life.
*'Words that represent me' activity. Similar to the page in the book, students can come up with some single words that they feel symbolise them or things that have happened in their life and write them above the leaves. They can then draw pictures around the leaves to go with these words.
*Research activity. This activity can be completed as a class or independently. Students can research the importance of trees and how this importance relates to the support and growth of the family unit.
*Comprehension question discs- literal and inferential.
*Activity prompts. These include reading, writing, drawing, making, observing and mindful activity prompts.
Australian Curriculum content descriptions
Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning about key events, ideas and information in texts that they listen to, view and read by drawing on growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features (ACELY1660)
Identify the audience of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts (ACELY1668)
Draw connections between personal experiences and the worlds of texts, and share responses with others (ACELT1596)
Discuss how authors and illustrators make stories exciting, moving and absorbing and hold readers’ interest by using various techniques, for example character development and plot tension (ACELT1605)
Understand, interpret and experiment with sound devices and imagery, including simile, metaphor and personification, in narratives, shape poetry, songs, anthems and odes (ACELT1611)
Identify and explain how choices in language, for example modality, emphasis, repetition and metaphor, influence personal response to different texts (ACELT1615)