Organise the classroom so there is room to set up a display, in this case the model of Bottle Village. If possible move desks so that there is a space around the model village for children to sit close to it during talking time. It is easier for them to imagine the events going on in the village if they can see it set out. Then the fun starts!
The background is a collection of three styrofoam sheets from a local warehouse that sells refrigerators. An old pale-blue bed sheet has been folded in half and seamed to make pockets for the styrofoam to be slotted in. This automatically hinges to stand up as the background and can be folded concertina style and intact to store. Pins can be pushed into the styrofoam to attach the title and any other labels, as well as the clouds and the sun.
The sun is a circle of card with a scrunched up yellow supermarket plastic bag attached to it. If you have no glue or staples, stitch the yellow plastic to the circle of card with big stitches of string or twine. The white cloud is made from another supermarket bag..but this supermarket has white bags!
The "Welcome to Bottle Village" sign is an opened up cornflakes box with yellow plastic bags stitched in place to make a frame. Notice that the lettering is lower case and also notice the balance of letter sizes. If a child wants to write the word village, he does not have to ask the teacher and, by using the word, the letter pattern starts to become retained in his visual memory.
The hills forming the island are a collection of boxes in which Bottle Village is stored away afterwards. But part of the hill shape is made from the cardboard packing found in boxes of bottles that stop the bottles knocking each other. This is ideal as it can be concertina-ed afterwards to pack away. The green is a mixture of fabric pieces and green plastic bags opened up.
The Bottle Village houses are the tops of plastic milk bottles cut down, with doors and windows cut out. Some of the buildings have been labeled for children to refer to if they want to write the word in their stories, This way they are being independant and do not have to ask the teacher ot guess the spelling.
The ornamental plant stand in the village centre is an empty thread spool with cardboard leaves cut out and pushed into the spool centre.
The sea and the river is a random collection of scraps of anything blue stitched together. It actually makes children realise that the sea can be made up of lots of colours and textures and noticing details like this encourages it to come out in their writing.The beach is a scrap of yellow fabric, but coloured plastic bags would do.
The boats are shampoo bottles cut sideways and their nets are cut down plastic vegetable bags.
The round glass bottle was found after I had written the story. I had been looking out for such a bottle for some months and I found this one quite unexpectedly in a drawer belonging to my father, just after he died. I have no idea why he had it and it was sadly too late to ask him. Maybe he liked the Bottle Village idea too. He was a tidy, Bottle Village type person! I hope I don't break this bottle.....I am so scared that I might!
How to start.
As the model starts to be put together, the children automatically become interested. Cash in on this by inviting them to help set it up and to sit around the display and discuss it. Too many teachers dash straight into a writing activity, not giving nearly enough time to talking. Talking is the start of writing and you need to do lots of it beforehand! The children should feel familiar with the display, should not feel it’s a “Don’t touch” place. Talk about the places in the village, the sounds of the village, the smells, the way being there would make you feel. Encourage adjectives and adverbs from younger children, similes and metaphors from older ones.
Label the main things on the model. Then get a child to collect up the labels and put them back in the correct place. Make a game of this.
Reading the story
Have the children around you and near to the model, as you do this. Get them to practice moving from their seats to the theme corner, so that a calm atmosphere is created and maintained. Once there, they need to be in the best possible position to encourage them to give you their full attention and not be distracted. There needs to be lots of two way eye contact. (Also they need to have opportunities during their school day, to be in different parts of the classroom, so moving to the theme corner helps here. Well, would you want to sit in the same place all day and everyday?)
Remember that when you read to them, you are also a role model for when they read. Put lots of expression in your voice and try to make sure the children are visualising the story as you go. Be brave and use different voices for the different story characters who speak. Make the whole thing fun. And when you are not reading the story, leave it in a place where the children can readily pick it up to read themselves. The best thing is to prop the book on a stand, (maybe made from an old wire coat hanger), facing forwards and keep it displayed to tempt anyone to read. Always do this with whatever book you are reading to them.
Bottle Village Phonics I have also used the Bottle Village theme to teach phonics. I often ask teachers when they teach phonics, "Why do you start at the letter "a" and then work your way through the alphabet? Why don't you teach the letters that are most used and therefore most needed first?" Too often we just do things and forget to ask "Why?" But I break my own rule with the Bottle Village letter sounds book, as I want it to demonstrate to teachers that if you can link letter sounds with a picture or a story, the children often associate the letter with that story and remember that letter sound more quickly.
Please note the importance of using soft breath sounds and not the harsh sounds our grandmothers had to learn. Grandma's sounds never did blend together to make a word anyway!
In the Bottle Village letter sound story, Fleur, the florist, notices her baby Flora has put something in her mouth which makes her cough.
(The puppet of Baby Flora is made in a minute and a half from a brown paper bag, some scrunched scrap paper for stuffing, a piece of lace and a blue ribbon. It is so useful, as I give it to the child who is likely to be fidgety to hold and I quietly check during the story, "that baby Flora is OK". This works wonders!)
In trying to stop her baby coughing, Fleur puts her left hand with its finger pointed upwards to the side of her face, (and so mimicking the letter shape) saying "a", the first letter sound. Fleur removes the object from the baby and pours the baby a drink. The sound of drink being poured is the phonic sound "b". But the baby goes on coughing c,c,c.The story continues as Fleur hears a drummer outside "d,d,d" . Granny, who is asleep in her rocking chair, is told that Fleur will take the baby for a walk around Bottle Village. Granny, who wakes having not heard clearly, cups her hand round her ears and says the phonic sound "e" followed by "excuse me?"
Fleur and the baby come across all sorts of phonic sounds on the walk, from the dog panting, "h,h,h,", the lampost humming "l", the school boy humming mmm,
the ice cream refridgerator "n" to the sound of the baker's van, "v." and all other letter sounds in between. After the walk, Fleur puts Flora to bed, (Flora asks for a kiss, "x") and, as the baby yawns y,y,y, and then falls asleep, a fly buzzes above the cot in a z pattern making the sound zzzzzz.
The regular class-listening to this story makes the children quickly become familiar with it and with the appropriate letter sounds that are an integral part of it. With the "Bottle Village Letter Sounds" book left in a prominent place in the Book Nook, and with children being given opportunities to go there and relax, they choose this little book and confidently "read" it to themselves, so re enforcing their letter sound knowledge still further. Some teachers have said they would need more than one copy for this Book Nook activity. Some say several copies! I am flattered at their enthusiasm for such a simple idea.
Writing
The teacher needs to read the story first and have vocabulary word lists (a word wall) the children might need during their written work about Bottle Village.
Leave some wall space nearby for a map of the village, or large drawings of one of the characters. You might choose the gardener, drawing round a pupil, cutting out the shape and colouring in the clothes and adding gardening tools and plant pots, clearly labeled of course. You might set aside a shelf to display ways to use bottles as the people do in Bottle Village. The musician’s ideas of playing tunes on bottles of water should be fun!
Once writing has started, always allow children to leave their seats to go to the display for words. They can copy the word they need, but they should, when ready, be encouraged to go and look, “write the word in their brain” and return to their work to write. This is important. It encourages visual memory and improved spelling.
1. For younger ones:
a) Get them to draw a Bottle Village picture and write a sentence about it. The youngest ones will need you to write the words so that they can copy your writing. Offer a variety of ideas, like draw the children playing on the beach, draw the gardener in his garden, draw the big glass bottle floating on the ocean.
b) Cloze cards (Missing word cards)
An early stage cloze work card. Please note that on this particular card, all the words on the list to choose from, start with the letter "b", so the writer has to give a more detailed look before choosing. By the way, the scoop is made from an empty and thoroughly washed bleach bottle with the bottom and one side cut out. The handle is still in tact , but cannot be seen in the 'photo. This was a popular prop in any drama work about the baker.
Cloze cards offer an ideal next step for younger writers, the easiest cards starting with the missing word at the end of the sentence, progressing to the words being missing elsewhere in the sentence. See an example below about the Bottle Village baker.
Cloze work encourages children to take contextual clues, an essential reading skill for young readers. We all do it! Cloze also allows the children to work independently, as all the words they need are on the card. You could do a sequence of cards getting the children to work through this sequence so ending up with a complete story. This could be a version of the Bottle Village story.
2. For older children, progress to question cards, insisting that the answers are given as a complete sentence and reminding the children of the three main characteristics of a sentence:
A sentence always starts with a capital letter.
A sentence always ends with a full stop, (or question mark, or exclamation mark).
A sentence always makes sense.
(And teachers should make sure that all sentences they write follow this rule.)
It is also worth frequently reminding the children that most of the words they will need in the answer are already hiding in the question. Some children take a long time to realise this if it is not pointed out to them.
Comprehension work follows on from this, with a greater volume of text used. Children need to be given the hint that often the answers to the first questions can be found at the beginning of the text and answers to later questions come further into the text and answers to the last questions can often be found at the end of the text.
Please note that some children find scanning text to look for answers very difficult. Similarly, they find scanning an overloaded chalkboard difficult to find what they are looking for, so don’t overload a chalkboard and, if possible, use various chalk colours to highlight areas. As for helping them to improve scanning texts, get them to search for details in pictures and to search for words that stand out easily in texts, like names that can be more easily found because they start with a capital letter.
3. Creative writing
Progress to creative writing using pictures, music, whale calls, a box that has been washed ashore, etc. as a stimulus. But again, allow time for thinking and talking and listening before you expect the children to write. They sometimes feel threatened about starting a new piece of written work, because they are afraid to make mistakes.
To overcome this in say, poetry writing, one idea is to put a pile of slips of scrap paper on each desk. You give the stimulus, in this case some sounds of the sea. This could be an audio tape, although I have found the percussion of gently scrunched sellophane paper is good. Each child writes a line, a phrase or group of words and gently comes up to the front and waits until there are 6 children there. A seventh child comes up and sits in front of the line of six. The stimulus, if this is music or a percussion spound, is presented again and, in turn, each child reads his or her line, the stimulus being presented between each line read. Then there is time to congratulate and think, and child number 7 decides on the best order of line reading, asks the readers to move into that order and the poem is then performed, the lines now in the best order and the stimulus sounds in between them. Then children can return to their seats and, using more paper scraps, can create more lines of their own and arrange them in what they consider to be the best order.(Avoid confining pupils to thinking that poetry has to rhyme! Many find this far too confining and, remembering that poetry is words in a pattern, a list of ideas will be fine.)
Whatever they write, offer classroom opportunities for the other students to have the wrtitten work read to them and/or have the work displayed so it can be admired and shared. This practice of publishing children's writing always encourages improved quality of work.
Give the older children opportunities to write in a variety of genres, e.g. narrative, reported, descriptive, dialogue, letter writing, etc. Use a table setting for drama work, re enact the beach scene to create dialogue, or make some brown paper bag puppets to enact a village discussion. Make a list of the characters in the story and encourage the children to act the part of one and write a character description.
Mime the gardener making a garden in a bottle, or the baker scooping his flour and making bread.From this the children could write in the "How to" genre.
4 Grammar work.
Do any grammar work using the story text. e.g. sentence construction, speech marks, paragraphs, parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc.
5 Spelling
Word Books.
Children need opportunities to obtain a visual image of the word. This is fine when there are words for them to refer to around the room, but they need also to have access to words for spelling when the words that they want are not there. I suggest that if it can be afforded, an ordinary exercise book cut so that it is thumb indexed, with words they need to know carefully and neatly written on the appropriate page, will pay dividends and can be moved on to the next class and for as long as the child needs it.
Click here for How to make a word book
Spelling "Tests"
Give spelling "tests", where you are testing them on what they know, not on what they don’t know. (You already know what they don’t know, so why test that!) Most pupils should get 85% or more correct. You want pupils to feel that they CAN spell, NOT that they CAN’T! Use the words on the display, taking one word and maybe using other words that are in the same family. e.g. sand, land, band, hand; beach, reach; sea and tea. Do not confuse children by giving them homographs in the same spelling test e.g. beach, beech, or sea, see. It is better to concentrate on one spelling family at a time and wait until the pupil has mastered this first. Let them get out of their seat to go and look at the word if they need to, but unless they are really weak spellers, do not allow them to take their book to the display, but rather encourage them to "photograph" the spelling in their head. They can always go back and check. And if you are a teacher who wants to let the children check and mark their spellings, this can also be a learning situation for them, as you can call out the word to be checked, a child has the job of running and pointing to it, whilst you write the word clearly on the chalk board and talk about it. This will again give children the opportunity to memorise it visually. Teach spelling, don't test it!
And during all this Bottle Village project, include stories, poetry, songs around the theme of a village by the sea.
