Lazy Jack (Fiction, Year 3)

Lazy Jack is one of the fiction books of choice for Year 3 according to the Curricular Guidelines I use. This is the outline you can read on the book back cover:

A mournful princess sits at her castle window. Meanwhile, Jack (probably the laziest person in the world) is sent out to work by his mother. On his first day he is paid a shiny coin, but he drops it on the way home. "You should have put it in your jacket pocket!" cries his mother. So the next day, having worked for a dairyman, he pours the jug of milk he is given in payment into his jacket pocket! In fact, he always follows his mother's most recent advice when bringing home his day's earnings: it results in the most ridiculous scenarios. But carrying home the donkey makes the mournful princess laugh, and that really is a good thing!

In my classroom, using Lazy Jack, we have focused on describing characters and drama.

DESCRIBING CHARACTERS

For carrying out this task, we have used Kidspiration Software and VCOO Pyramids one more time (you can find information about these pyramids in the post on Resources for the Literacy Classroom). 

In Kidspiration you can find two different templates to describe characters in the software. We used the following one:

Example of the Picture View for Jack, the main character of the story

Children have to complete the map in the Picture View with adjectives chosen according to the story. They have to choose some sentences or passages and write them in the Writing View. Let's see the example for the adjective 'lazy'.

Then, we provide the children with the VCOP Pyramid to help them to write their descriptions. We made a Pyramid especially for this task:

This is the VCOP Pyramid we did - sorry for the picture quality. You can download all the necessary to built a pyramid like this one HERE.

On this occasion, we also made a Power Point Presentation to guide the students while writing their descriptions:

DRAMA: SOUNDSCAPE

Just for a change we decided to try this drama technique this time instead of repeating frozen scenes (we used them for Fat Cat on a Mat), which are very 'teachable' as well. 

Our idea to develop this technique was by making groups. These groups will work, in turns, in “pairs of groups”. This is, every group is going to choose a scene and create the relating soundscape. They must analyze the scene, talk about the options, the characters, the possibilities… For the performance, one of the group of the “pair” will make the sounds to re-create the environment of the chosen scene and the other group will have to infer the scene recreated and create the pertinent frozen scene. Later, the groups swap places. 

We used two scenes: the moment when the princess finally laugh (the most advisable) and the wedding (the end of the story). One of the challenges when carrying out this task was that we were prompt to do it with no-props (no masks, no decorations, etc.)

TO DOWNLOAD ALL MY RESOURCES TO WORK WITH THIS BOOK, CLICK HERE