What a surprise! I was a little apprehensive, thinking that it would be so hard to teach little people who can't yet read.   But this has been another fantastic experience. 

The students are very,very much alive!  Such vibrant little characters - every day I went home with something funny to keep myself and others laughing... Such as boys on the one team all lying on the ground fighting over the ball - no one willing to let go!  (Maybe you had to be there).

The teacher told me that this is such a rewarding grade to teach - I now understand.

The story of "The boy with the sticky up hair" was created especially to tie in with the work the students were participating in at the time.  Being a Catholic school, the SOSE and science integrated also with RE.

The unit I have created to fit in with the reef to the rainforest is called "A Gift from the King".

This unit introduces the students to the gift of creation as a gift to them from their heavenly father. 

This teaching utilizes the story of “The boy with the sticky-up hair”, a story of a boy with an unknown secret identity, as the son of the king.  This is revealed to him by ocean spirits that take him on a journey to the mangroves and enlighten him to the fact that other girls and boys are also children of the king – but they have forgotten who they really are. 

The students will explore the connectedness of the environment with food chains and webs, and will particularly be looking into the reef to the rainforest and those creatures depending on this environment. A focus point in the unit will be the mangroves and the rule, “leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but memories”. 

The students will plant seeds and care for the growth of the plants.

The students will become familiar with the creation story as told in the Bible, Genesis chapters 1,2 and 3.  Through this the students will be encouraged in their responsibilities as the children of God, to care for the environment, themselves and each other.

The RE componant looked at the story of creation.  This integrated perfectly as we firstly looked at the basic story in Gensis one, that it was good, and integrated this with ordinal numbers in maths.

Next we looked at how we are made in God's image and Gensis two, which states more in depth, that the garden and all the animals were brought to the man to name.  We looked at the meaning of names and what it means if you are the one doing the naming - how it is under your care and protection. In other words we looked at the SOSE value of stewardship as a divine gift from God.

After that we looked at the story of the Fall - I re-wrote this to be in a more suitable form as the childrens bible did not seem to be holding the students attention  - this proved to be more sucessful, with more pictures and more explanations, but very careful to keep to the authentic bible writing.