Visit from Lyn Kriegler

This week we were lucky to have a visit from Lyn Kriegler who is an author and an illustrator. She has produced over 150 books!  WOW!  She talked to us about how she first started to write stories when she was a little girl, and she showed us how she made her first story books from one piece of paper.  With a bit of clever cutting she could show her story on separate pages... and on one big page!

Lyn also brought her toys and puppets.  She has had some of these since she was a little girl.  Lyn works for part of the year at a school in India.  She leaves her puppets here though because the children are frightened of them!  We loved them... have a look!

Carrying Lyn's things to Room 8.

We decided to have a go at writing our own little books.  It was the perfect way to show the research we had done on SNAKES this week as part of our READING work.

We started with a BIG BOOK called SNAKES and we first recorded what we knew about snakes BEFORE we even read the book.  (This is called our PRIOR KNOWLEDGE).  We knew lots... considering there are no snakes in New Zealand!  Miss Coverdale was very impressed!  Then we read the book.  It's a story, not a non-fiction book but there was quite a lot of information about snakes.  After that we recorded our new information and then worked out what we knew at the end of our reading, that we didn't know at the beginning.

On Wednesday we did some more research about snakes on the laptops and iPads.  We found lots of new facts to add to what we already knew.

Our little books contain information about snakes.  We have drawn pictures and written sentences.

Have a look at some of our books below.  We didn't practise anything before we did these. These are our first drafts.  Have a look.