Speaking and listening around the story narrative and the classroom model.
Speaking and listening around the story text, vocabulary, punctuation, sentence construction, etc.
Reading the Bottle Village story, but also other story and non-fiction texts round the theme. (Some of these can, of course, be homemade by the teacher and by the pupils.)
Formal writing, cloze cards, question and answer cards, spoken and written comprehension
Creative writing using various stimuli to inspire, visual, sound, smells, objects..
Character Study writing about the various people who are in Bottle Village.
Play writing, drama, puppets, monologues, dialogues.
Reported writing.... Newspaper report, "Bottle bobs to shore" "The bottle on the beach".
Poster writing....Florist's poster for Mother's Day orders, tourist poster for Bottle Village, Bottle Village cricket team event poster. Poster promoting eco friendship in Bottle Village e.g.
Be respectful to you environment
Offer help in cleaning up
Try to keep your neighbourhood clean
Take care to recycle
Love nature and treasure it
Exchange your ideas with others
Value the space around you
Invent ways to reuse things
Leave your snack spot tidy
Look after wildlife
Always put rubbish in the right place
Go kindly out of your way to teach others to be eco friendly
Enjoy and be proud of what you can achieve
How to writing...How to make a garden in a bottle. How to make a musical instrument out of water filled glass bottles
Post card writing from a visitor to Bottle Village.
Imaginative writing...My journey across the ocean, by A. Bottle.
Poetry writing on a theme of Ocean.
Descriptive writing...An ocean view as the bottle approaches. A description of Bottle Village.
Letter writing.....Thank-you letters to the gardener and the builder. (These envelopes are the inside out sachets that some tea bags come in. The post box is an empty herb jar)
Writing a letter in response to one found in a bottle on the beach
Children love to take a letter out of a bottle, read it and invent a reply.
Developing other curriculum areas through the Bottle Village theme.
Science...the sea shore, growing seeds, oceanography, different ways of building houses.
Number....Work cards involving 4 rules and Bottle Village and the people who live and work there, volume and shape relationships with bottles e.g. collect bottles then estimate and measure their volume capacity. (Are some bottles made to look as if they hold more than they do?) money, shape, capacity etc
.
Social Studies...working together as a community, being helpful, responsible.
Geography...shorelines, ocean currents, erosion and deposition.
History...the history of a coastal village, the early settlers there, their livelihoods, housing, clothes.
Music...sea songs, percussion sea sounds, tunes from bottles filled with different amounts of water.
Drama... Miming the story of Bottle Village, puppet plays, dance on a theme of ocean, conversations in one of the Bottle Village shops, television/radio interviews, radio play of the story.
Art and Craft...Drawings of the events...maybe made into a comic strip, child sized collages of the various characters with speech bubbles, model of village, pebble painting, beach wood sculpting and painting, seascapes, welcome signs and calligraphy, puppet making.
Environmental Studies...pollution and re-cycling
During a workshop, teachers make brown paper bag puppets of Bottle Village characters.
Then, in twos or threes they create a dialogue between the characters.
Then, it's back to school to show the children how to do it too.
My teacher training chart showing the above list, ends with these gradually fading words:
Sorry everyone!
I could go on, as the list is almost endless,
but as you can see,
I am running out of paper
and my pens are running dry!