Desert island topic
I haven’t posted for ages – my SATs revision was not exciting enough to be worth writing about! But with SATs now over (for a while, anyway!), I can get back to more interesting teaching.
Last week I did a great project with my class based on the idea of being stranded on a desert island. Some of the ideas were borrowed from a resource found on TES and the idea was that it will begin to stimulate some ideas for when we do the transition units on Kensuke’s Kingdom.
I didn’t have the energy to do much planning, so it was kept very simple. During the week, I read Nim’s Island to them as our class novel.
1) I showed them the opening scene from the Sims Castaway game, which shows the character’s cruise ship sinking and him being washed up on a deserted beach. We discussed how he might feel and what he might be thinking. The children filled in a planning sheet with simple boxes for them to jot down ideas about the island location and terrain, the plants and animals on the island and the objects they had with them when the ship sank.
2) We looked at copies of the maps from the books Kensuke’s Kingdom and Nim’s Island and discussed how they showed things in a more personal and pictorial way than maps in traditional atlases. The children then began drawing their own maps of their imaginary desert island.
3) The children read extracts from the biography of Alexander Selkirk, a Tudor sailor who survived on a deserted island for four years. We looked at the first few tasks in the Sims Castaway game and read the automatically generated diary entry. The children began writing their own diary entries (using the class set of laptops) about what had happened to them on their first day on the island.
4) I explained to the children their next task – to build a model shelter, using only a pair of scissors (an axe), string (rope), lolly sticks (planks of wood), pins (nails) and anything they could find around the school grounds (e.g. twigs and leaves). They drew blueprints and then we went outside to build the shelters.
5) The children carried on adding to their maps and diaries. I gave them a few new prompts each day, for example showing scenes from the Sims Castaway game where he becomes friends with the orangutans, finds signs of life (an old hut and an ancient temple) and explores the island further.
6) I showed the children the scene where the Sims character meets other survivors from the ship. The children drew themselves on one half of a piece of paper and the character they were going to meet on the other half then drew speech and thought bubbles to show the first dialogue between the characters. They then wrote the next diary entry about meeting the other character.
7) After half term, we will build model rafts and discuss how they can escape from the island. They will then finish their diary entries.
The children have been completely engaged in the work and written some brilliant diary entries. You can see the diary entries on our class website:
http://class-6k.wikispaces.com/Desert+islands
Filed under: Creativity, Cross curricular, DT, Narrative, Topics, Year 6 | Tagged: desert island, diary
