Stealth Teaching - Literacy under the Radar

Only one more Monday and ten more sleeps…as teachers we are always wishing our lives away looking forward to the next holidays. I fully intend to make the most of the last few weeks however and we have embarked on our Beastie film making project.

Creating the Story

We began by reading the Hungry Caterpillar, such a beautiful classic by Eric Carle. We talked about how the author would have to know all about the life cycle of a butterfly before he could have written the story. It is fiction but informed by facts. I challenged the groups to come up with their own stories about beasties informed by what they have learned.

As usual I was highly entertained by the results. I’m particularly looking forward to the horror film about Daniel’s preying mantis which is set to devour Rebecca’s unsuspecting bee! ‘That is what they do!’ I was reliably informed and I didn’t say all the stories had to be nice! They set their ideas into frames with pictures and writing. I discovered that this is a great way of developing writing in infant classes, as they were so desperate to get their ideas down in the process of planning to make their film. Some children who are really reluctant writers wrote with great enthusiasm under their frames.

Creating the Scene

Having storyboarded our ideas we set about doing some art work to create scenes as a backdrop for the filming. I asked the children to set their own targets for the scenes once we had cast a critical eye over lots of different illustrators work.

We loved Lydia Monk’s illustrations in What the Ladybird Heard and I brought in another of her and Julia Donaldson’s books, ‘Sharing a Shell’. The children loved the technique of highlighting particular objects or characters on the page with glitter to make them stand out. We have done a lot of work this year on illustration and how it can bring a story or poem to life and the children can now give some quite mature and insightful comment to such discussions. We also loved the level of detail in the Lydia Monk illustrations and her use of collage technique to add texture to the page.

The children have set about creating their own scenes using these techniques and adding targets of their own. For example, using bright colour to make the scene look happy or dark colour to make it scary or making sure the page is full. We aim to have our characters and scenes finished soon so we can start the filming process on Friday.

The Bugly Bug Ball

This was so much fun! Disguising learning in the form of a party is a great way to pretend we aren’t doing any work! I stealthily extracted a great deal of work from my unsuspecting class however – firstly they all had to fill in an entry form in order to come to the ball as they would be taking part in the Bugliest Bug Contest (to be judged by the Deputy Head). They made sure this was done as well as they could manage – it was a competition after all, and I ended up with some great factual writing about arachnids or insects depending on which category they had decided to enter.

They also made posters for the ball explaining where, when and what was involved and I then had a piece of functional writing as well.

They designed costumes from big pieces of paper, made masks, decided on numbers of legs, types of antennae and any other feature or characteristic their beastie required. They worked together to stick their costumes on and enjoyed seeing each other transform into all manner of different bug. They used cutting skills, drawing, tracing, researching…so much learning and so much fun!

We decorated the classroom with the posters and caterpillar balloons and donned our costumes for the ball (I was a bee, ably assisted by Mrs Blackstalk the blue bottle!).

The competition involved each bug introducing themselves and taking about what made them the bugliest bug. Certificates were given out for the winners. We jitterbugged to bug music (including the Ugly Bug ball of course), ate bug jelly, decorated bug cakes, played pin the legs on the centipede and a great time was had by all!

I’d love to hear about any other ideas for stealth teaching (as I like to think about it). When did your class last have so much fun they didn’t realise they were learning anything?

Multi-Arts Glow Chat

I’ll also finish with a quick plug for a GLOW meet which takes place on Thursday (and I happen to be hosting!). It’s about organising a multi arts project, such as the one I did with my class creating our textile Scottish Poetry book. You would be most welcome to join in the discussion.

Hope to see you there and I look forward to your comments,

Lucy