The children of St. Michael’s began the new school year by reading the story ‘In Our Hands’ by Lucy Farfort. When the world is plagued with isolation and cursed to live without colour, it is up to a group of determined children to grow a seed of hope that will inspire everyone to come together and build a better future. Each year explored the text and came up with a range of different activities to complete. Have a a look of what we have done!
In Year 1, they had lots of discussions about the moral of the story and the messages we received as readers. We shared lots of ideas as a class and then decided to write a golden sentence to summarise our own interpretation of the moral of the story!
Year 2 wrote predictions of what would happen next in the story and wrote a letter to the main character for helping tp bring all the colours back to the world!
Year 3 summarised the story, with a focus on what we can learn about team work and working together to change the world. We then created a double page spread like one you would find in the book. We thought about where we would put our text and which pictures we would draw to illustrate it. We drafted our ideas first before using our best handwriting and drawings!
In Year 5, they annotated different pictures from the story and created illustrations of own version of Dulling!
Year 6 created freeze frames. They focused on the scene where the adults ignored the children’s efforts to bring change to the world. The freeze frames depicted the adults’ reactions to the children’s efforts and how this made the children feel. They used thought tapping to bring some of the characters’ thoughts to life and their inference skills to create annotated illustrations of the main character. From the text and illustrations in the book, they made inferences about the character’s qualities, motivation and intentions.
Year 4 drew the main character after watching the author illustrate her work. They also created a ‘Role on the Wall’ to show what they had learned about the main character and wrote letters of encouragement to the children who were trying to bring colour back to the world.
Through discussion, Reception explored different parts of the story as part of their Personal, Social and Emotional Development. They have been exploring and expanding their knowledge and understanding that there are different kinds of responsibilities, rights and duties at home, school, in the community and towards the environment. They have already been showing great responsibility in looking after their classroom environment and have helped created artwork for a class display.
St Michael’s have really explored how change can be made when we all have a mind to work together. We have explored that something small can ignite great things – we know that a bright future is ‘In our Hands.’
“The people should not think that small beginnings are unimportant.” Zechariah 4:10a