Whole Class Junior Journal 60 Resource: Year 3 – Mariri, the Flying Man

This comprehensive teaching package, designed around the Cook Islands’ traditional tale “Mariri, the Flying Man” from Junior Journal 60, aims to boost your students’ reading comprehension. It’s a valuable addition to any Year 3 structured literacy curriculum.

“Mariri, the Flying Man”—Junior Journal 60: This story recounts the explorer Mariri’s discovery of a new island (now Atiu) and his inventive plan to return to Avaiki, bringing his wife along.

This resource engages students in vital reading practices: deep comprehension strategies, vocabulary enrichment, sentence construction and punctuation, verbal reasoning, and building background knowledge—all foundational to the Science of Reading framework.

How to Implement:

This is a whole-class teaching tool. It includes an 80-slide slideshow, supplementary worksheets, and visual organisers.

• Project the Junior Journal PDF and distribute copies of the text (2-3 students per copy). Using the slideshow’s Presenter View, you’ll have a complete, ready-to-use lesson.
• The text is divided into three sections, designed for three separate sessions, allowing ample time for vocabulary and content exploration.
• Accompanying the text are discussion prompts designed to encourage critical thinking and student dialogue.

Days four and five focus on:

• A GIST summarizing task.
• A Story Plot Mountain graphic organiser for text structure analysis.
• Critical thinking questions that promote deeper connections and inferences.

Key Features:

• Emphasis on comprehension monitoring, summarising, conclusion drawing, and evidence-based reasoning.
• Comprehension tasks that go beyond simple recall.
• Literacy activities that reinforce key writing skills (sentence structure and punctuation).
• A GIST summarizing activity to help students condense the text into a 20-word summary, improving comprehension and retention.
• A Story Plot Mountain graphic organiser for analyzing the text’s structure.
• Explicit vocabulary instruction with definitions, examples, and semantic activities (synonyms and antonyms).
• Activities directly aligned with the New Zealand English Curriculum for Year 3, focusing on comprehension, summarising, and inference.

Benefits:

• Fosters active learning and student engagement through reading, discussion, and critical analysis.
• Develops vocabulary and enhances comprehension strategies, suitable for diverse learners, including those needing extra support.
• Encourages students to connect the text to personal experiences, deepening understanding.

Alignment with the New Zealand English Curriculum:

This resource helps students:

• Monitor and confirm understanding through annotation, rereading, questioning, and visualization.
• Summarise and draw conclusions, identifying key details.
• Make inferences using explicit and implicit information, drawing on prior knowledge.
• Analyse text structure and language for effect.
• Think critically by examining perspectives and making connections.