Vanishing Ireland-a book with so many teaching possibilities!

I love picking up this book to flick through every now and again and read a story or two about the lives of Ireland's older generation.  There are so many amazing stories of Irish people, giving a little snippet of their lives, along with beautiful photographs.

When looking through it last year, I had an idea to use it during a team teaching lesson with a wonderful colleague of mine.

Our focus was to develop their ability to describe characters (for Narrative Writing), using photographs.  We were also giving them the opportunity to practise their comprehension strategies (which had been taught explicitly throughout the year).

To begin, my colleague read 'Old Danny Murphy' to the children, which had them mesmerised as she read it with such expression.

Then, we showed them one photo from the book on the visualiser and we modelled a character description together for the children.

Huge scope for Oral Language development here too!

What can you infer from the photo?

Following this, they split into groups to do a collaborative character description. Each group had a different photo.

To finish, each group described their character to the class, while showing their photo.  The observations and comments from the various groups were AMAZING....we were both blown away by the connections and inferences they made by looking at the smallest details of the photographs.  Leaving the textbook on the shelf and using a book I had found at home led to one of the most memorable lessons for me!

They enjoyed it so much that they wanted to write their character descriptions on their own writing frames the following day!

So if anyone has this book lying on a shelf at home, bring it in to your class someday as a stimulus for an Art lesson, to develop comprehension strategies, discuss how life in Ireland has changed or simply to read a page about one of these incredible individuals! The possibilities are endless!

Or have a look to see if you have other books lying around that have the potential to provide an interesting stimulus to a lesson.

Feel free to share your ideas below!