We focused our federation Book Week on the book ‘Inside the Villains’. This book was a wonderful stimulus to start our week and had the children captivated by the mechanical elements and moving parts! Each year group planned for some amazing activities and learning opportunities based around this book and the final products are brilliant!
‘It is wonderful to have these opportunities in the school year to inspire children to have a love of reading and encourage children to realise that they can aspire to become authors, poets or illustrators for their future careers!’
Reception
The children in Reception have been reading the Wolf section of the book ‘Inside the Villains.’ We read the story of ‘The Wolf and the seven little Goats’ and talked about what we thought a villain was. We read about the Wolf’s strengths and weaknesses and we enjoyed talking to our learning partners about our own. We have also been very busy reading wolf themed books and taking part in a variety of crafts.
Year 1
Year one children enjoyed exploring the villain characters in books this week. Their work was based around the wolf character and they listened to stories with wolves and other villains in. The children had to invent their own villain animal character and looked at words that might be used to describe them and what their qualities might be. The children also enjoyed sharing books with children in Year 4.
Year 2
Year 2 looked closely at the three villains in the book and thought about villains they knew of from other texts. Throughout the week the children worked towards creating a whole class book based on villains they have read about. They researched their villain using the kindles and thought carefully about their strengths, weaknesses and other attributes. Each child had to plan and make the character by thinking about moving parts and how these could be secured. Some children created pockets for implements, like the Giant, some children made tabs to hide things under, like the witch and some children made parts to pull out, like the Wolf’s stomach! By the end of the week the children had created the most marvellous class book and shared this with year 3 on Friday.
Year 3
During book week, Year 3 shared a story with year 2. The children took it in turns to read to each other and ask questions about the stories they were reading. We also created our own villain in DT, based on the villains in the book we focused on for the week. Year three created a wanted poster in English based around their own witch, using adjectives to describe them. In maths, we made a bar chart of our favourite villains in each class. The children collected the data and created a bar chart from this, both in their maths books and on Excel.
Year 4
During book week, Year 4 shared a story with year 1, children took it in turns to read to each other and ask questions about the stories they were reading. We also created many villainous top trumps cards. Year 4 got creative with story cubes and made some fantastic finger puppets. We also enjoyed using these to create a puppet show!
Year 5
Year 5 really enjoyed the chosen text, “Inside the Villains” by Clotilde Perrin. We used hot seating and questioning techniques to try to find out more about the characters’ feelings and motives. We studied their fact-files carefully and used that format to introduce the character that they had made up. These were presented very carefully to compile a class book. For DT we explored ways to make flaps, pockets, levers and pop-ups and then we developed these to create our own characters to add to the class books.
Bedtime stories
The children of both schools were able to attend the Federation annual Bedtime stories event. The children and their families came back to school in their pyjamas and with blankets and teddies to share stories, relax and listen to school staff reading and performing some of their favourite texts.