Franschhoek Literary Festival: Winnie the Witch

My school is a stone's throw from the little town of Franschhoek. This is a most exciting week, as the Franschhoek Literary Festival is happening. A lucky off-shoot of that is that we get very exciting literary guests during the Literary Festival. Each grade gets a different author or illustrator who comes and talks to them. This year, one of the guests who will be visiting our Grade 1 class is Korky Paul, the illustrator of the Winnie the Witch books. Winnie the Witch is very popular here at Bridge House School, so we are all very excited to meet Korky Paul.

In IT this week, the Grade 1s got into the spirit of things by helping Winnie the Witch unravel some Witchy Words. I created an MS Publisher template that, when opened, looked like this:

A mixed-up magical mess.

I've put a download link at the bottom of the post if you would like to download the free the template.

Winnie the Witch, I explained to the kids, had sent us a message. The problem was, though, that her magic has mixed-up the words and made them all witchy. Their job was to use MS Publisher to untangle her message.

The Grade 1s had to click-and-drag the words around so that the four sentences made sense. We talked about clues that could help us figure out the sentence structure, such as capital letters and punctuation. We also talked about making sure our sentences were neat and tidy and no words were floating off in page. We got more familiar with the complexity of clicking-and-dragging in Publisher, especially use of the undo arrow to fix any strange mistakes. The students enjoyed the activity and were proud to print their finished product.

Some Witchy Words proudly on display in the JP IT Lab.

Explaining what our objective was.

A close-up of two of our fantastic pieces of work.

Click here to download the free Witchy Words .pub template (Dropbox).

Sun Safety and Reptiles

Hello!

We have kick-started our way into the New Year here at Bridge House School. In Junior Primary we were lucky enough to be kitted out with a brand-new set of 26 lab computers, all upgraded to Windows 10. My students (as well as myself) have been tackling the new features with much enthusiasm.

The Grade 3s have been learning about sun safety. As we live in South Africa, it's summer right now and our sun can be extreme! We created Sun Tips posters using MS Publisher. This was done without a template, after our discussion about being safe in the sun I let them design their own posters.

These are proudly displayed in one of the Grade 3 classrooms.

Our Grade 2 students have started to delve into the world of reptiles. The acrostic exercise was my inspiration, despite how common they seem to be I've never used them in a lesson before. I laid out the R E P T I L E S on an MS Word page and had the students use their imagination to fill in the letter lines. I got the snazzy reptiles border from Sparklebox. 

Link to template for R E P T I L E S Acrostic page here.

Reptile fact acrostics on display outside in the Grade 2 playground.

For Coding Club this year I have tentatively begun to use the desktop-installed version of Scratch. This term I have a boisterous group of 15 young coders. I'm pleased to report that 3 girls are included in that number, and are just as boisterous as the others. We are slowly learning what we can do in Scratch, the possibilities seem endless!