Your School is the Best!
By: Maggie Hutchins and Felicita Sala
Everyone’s favourite cockroach is back, and this time he’s going to school! From show-and-tell arts and crafts, this little stowaway can’t wait to try it all…and maybe become the new teachers’ pet!
I had the best time spending time with my family in Queensland. Emma, my granddaughter, is teaching Year 4 in semi-rural school on the Sunshine Coast. There was lots of laughter reading and planning with this book. We hope you enjoy our TOP 20 ideas!
Top 20 Ideas:
- Invite the learners to the story and activate prior knowledge by showing an image of a cockroach or the real thing!
- Implement a five step prediction tool! Cover the front cover of the book with five different shapes. Each time you remove a shape the readers discuss and form a prediction. The predictions can be discussed, draw or written. Explore how the five predictions changed. After reading the book, confirm or reject your predictions.
- Using the clues on the front cover estimate the size of a cockroach. Recreate the scene to support the accuracy of your estimations.
- Make your own cockroach from a bead or pom pom. Your cockroach can be used to measure, play hide and seek, act out a scene, or inspire writing.
- Use your own cockroach to explore the comparative size with objects in the classroom or to measure. My pencil is 9 cockroaches in length.
- Check out the title page! Use the lunchboxes in your classroom to discover the most popular fruit/ foods in the classroom. Fingers crossed there was not a cockroach!
- What are the dimensions of your lunchbox? How will you check your estimations? Order lunch boxes by size.
- Venn with a friend – why is our school the best! Provide two paper plates to overlap to create a Venn diagram. (Pages 1 and 2)
- On page 3 the boy is packing his show and tell from his backpack. Sort the backpacks in your classroom by colour, size, features. Record the outcomes on your sort.
- Pages 3 and 4. Did the boy forget to take the cockroach? What evidence supports your thinking?
- What do you see the cockroaches would be saying to each other as they climb into the backpack on page 6? Make a small group and act out the conversation.
- Label the illustrations on pages 7 and 8 with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Create engaging sentences borrowing these words.
- What is happening on page 10? What music would you suggest for the cockroach to dance to? Make a playlist!
- Learn more about cockroaches. Here is one website we enjoyed reading
- Look closely at the page about BIG lunch. Label man made and natural characteristics. Add more detail! This could include ants, flowers…
- Find out which page made the most people laugh.
- Create a can, has, and likes chart about one of the characters from the story:
- – what can the cockroach do?
- – what does the cockroach have?
- – what does the cockroach like to do, eat…?
- Add onomatopoeia to your favourite pages!
- Check out the family portrait on the back cover – create your own.
- Make text to text connections with the other cockroach adventure – Your Birthday is the Best! Both books can be found here
Have an awesome start to the 2023 school year!
Emma and Andrea
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