“The War that Changed my Life” – What does that mean to you? Normally war and conflict really brings out the worse parts of society and life, but not in this story. Ada is a 10 year old girl who is relocated due to the events happening in WWII England, and as it ends up – it is for the better. Students were given an account of the lifestyle of various peoples in the United Kingdom during this catastrophic war, which was a terrific introduction into our next Topic unit on World War II. Year 6 students this week expanded their horizons on various literary aspects of the book, and created a storyboard to showcase the major events that occurred throughout the plot. It was a great week, we learned a lot and created a solid knowledge base that we can build from in the coming weeks!

Reading this text has been fascinating, sad and exciting. We started by making predictions. Nina used the title to connect the text to Jumanji and thought the box may bring Henry some magic. After this, we used Talk for Writing to step into the character’s shoes and act out the story. As there were some new words, we investigating the meaning, found antonyms and synonyms. The we moved on to using empathy and inference skills to answer questions in role and write a diary.

“It has a powerful message about equality” explained Daria.

“It is an interesting story that teaches you about slavery” replied Max and Nina.

Demigods, magic and a battle with the sun! That’s what we learnt about this week as part of Brilliant Book Week. Miss Wendy chose a book from Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s called How Maui Slowed the Sun. It’s about some brothers who were moaning that the sun moved across the sky too quickly and didn’t give them time to do there chores and gather food. So Maui (the demigod) made a plan to catch the sun with the help of a magical jaw bone. So, did they succeed? You’ll have to read the book or go online to find out what happens.

We had great fun learning new words, sequencing the story and best of all, we made up a play to retell the story. We also have made a new door display. What else have we been doing? … Well, reading, reading and reading more reading. Year 3 love books.

By Sasha, Vibhav, the Lizas, Uliana, Daniel and Vera.

The Book Week theme this year was ‘Reading is My Secret Power’, and, during Book Week, we discovered just how exciting reading can be. We read ‘Riding the Pony Express’, the story of the transcontinental mail service delivering messages, newspapers and mail across a distance of about 3000 kilometres between Missouri and California in the United States of America, from April 1860 to October 1861. We thoroughly enjoyed reading the adventures of three children at Owl Creek who learnt to work together to keep the mail moving. Activities, based on ‘Riding the Pony Express, included the following: watching a video clip, explaining the history of the Pony Express; reading aloud in groups the fourteen chapters of the book; learning vocabulary (spelling words) taken from the story; decorating our classroom door; and using an atlas to plot the route of the Pony Express on an outline map of the U.S.A.