Excursion to Gorge Wildlife Park

I personally love this place and have been many times. If you are fortunate enough to live in Adelaide, it is well worth a visit, for an excursion or in your own time. Our group was too large (121 students) to have the education sessions but they are on offer. They did allow for every student to either touch or hold a koala. Below are some photos of what we saw. The only issue we found was not having enough places to eat our food. There is a grass area and a covered area to eat but with that many students, it was difficult, but staggering eating times or smaller classes would be fine.

Gorge Wildlife Park
Redden Dr, Cudlee Creek SA AUSTRALIA 5232
9am-5pm daily (Except Christmas Day)
http://gorgewildlifepark.com.au/

My New Home By Dawn McMillan

We read this book over and over and the students asked to read it in their free time also. I used this with a group of 10 students.

What we did with the book

• read the book together
• read the book with each student reading a page
• found the 'doing words'/processes/verbs in the book
• counted words in sentences
• counted letters in words
• read the book and put our hands on our nose/head when we read a particular word e.g. my, said, dig
• found the high frequency words
• Used the colours for Functional Grammar to highlight aspects of the text e.g. participant, process, circumstance

We also created our own paper books where students cut and glued the story back together. I gave them little black and white wombats to place on the page on the same way they were in the book. They then coloured them, one grey, one brown. Students were then able to go home and read this to their family.

Wombats

We have been a little wombat mad recently. These loveable Australian animals have been our inspiration for a unit of work involving guided reading, oral language, writing information reports and writing descriptions. The group of ten students (Year 1 & 2 EALD/ESL students) I work with have become wombat experts and are very proud of their learning. 

I thought I would start by sharing the learning experiences we had, which ended with the students presenting their newly gained knowledge at the assembly.


I will explain some of these in more detail in future posts. These links will be bold. 

• Read (several times) the Oxford Guided Reading book 'My New Home' by Dawn McMillan
• Students to reconstruct 'My New Home' in a stapled book. 
• Viewing clips/videos of wombats
• As a group explore and jointly construct a description of a koala (to use a template for independent construction)
• Label a photograph of a wombat
• Use labelled photograph to write a description of a wombat
• Read (several times) the Oxford Guided Reading book 'Common Wombats' by Carmel Reilly
• Independently construct an Information report about wombats
• Excursion to Gorge Wildlife Park to see wombats and other Australian animals
• Make a burrow for a wombat.