K/F-2 Integrated English and Music unit: ‘Make a Wish’
Introduction to unit
Fairy tales help young children make sense of their world. Stretching across the realms of time and cultures; stories and songs entertain, inform, and imbue in young children important life lessons. Many traditional fairy tales are stories about wishes, in which characters reveal and search for their heart’s desire. Sometimes, the greedy, dark side of human nature impacts the way characters behave when they seek to have their wishes granted.
In this unit for Foundation students, we peruse several fairy tales, across a range of genres including multimodal texts, aural storytelling, musical scores, drama, and musical poetry. The common, magical thread is that the stories in the unit “Make a wish” comprise characters who, after some, oftentimes many challenges, have undergone positive life changes, resulting in important life lessons being learned.
It is expected this unit is best suited for implementation Term 3, 4 in the Foundation year, when students have some alphabetic knowledge and they would benefit from consolidation. Additionally, it is envisaged the integrated English/ music unit would be implemented alongside existing synthetics phonics programs in the school.
“Make a wish” provides many opportunities for students to practise their emerging alphabetic knowledge and skills, as well as focusing on meaning across multiple texts/ types of texts. Students will investigate the English concepts of character, narrative and code and convention throughout the unit.
The main text is about three colourful characters, a frog, a rabbit, and a robot, who are friends. They find an old lamp in an antique shop and a genie appears, an intertextual link to the famous fairy tale, Aladdin. The characters each wish for their heart’s desire, and instead of choosing to cooperate with each other, (human) greed intercedes, and an engaging narrative ensues.
Mackinlay & Karmazina (2020). Ribbit, Rabbit, Robot. Omnibus Books. Main text in unit.
