The Author - MERELYN CARTER
I’m a mother and a grandmother and I love kids. I also work with children at many levels and understand that like adults, we all want to feel safe and loved. Not every child is fortunate to have a healthy and happy parent/child relationship. Some have extended family relationships with grandparents, some have other significant adults in their life. Some just dream of it.
I was inspired to write this book by my own grandchildren. We are lucky to be able to tell each other on a regular basis ‘I love you to the moon and back – a million times’. I shared this with my children, we as a family share it with our grandchildren and I want to share it with other families. A child can never hear too often that they are loved. I also want to encourage kids to explore their imaginations and their creativity. Children in this decade feel like they have to grow up too quickly – I want to encourage them to be kids, to learn and create and explore life, to dream and go on wild adventures.
So, climb aboard Grandma’s Rocket ship and let’s blast off to the moon!
Merelyn Carter
The Incursion
This incursion will motivate and inspire children from preschool to year 2, to create their own stories. It will give them an understanding of the process of how books are created from the initial ideas, to storyboarding, illustrations, graphic design and publishing in an age appropriate manner.
Along with music, movement and story telling, I will give my own account and share the process of how To The Moon and Back – Grandma’s Rocket Ship Adventure was completed, from inspiration to publishing. Children will then have the opportunity to story board and create their own book using our specially designed templates.
The incursion will give children the opportunity to explore stories and storytelling in an engaging manner, and to develop an understanding of how authors share ideas through texts and images. The incursion has been developed in conjunction with early childhood and primary teachers to target key learning outcomes and curriculum content including storytelling patterns and structure, how authors create features of character and setting using language and images, and the development of plots, including orientation, complication, and resolution.
What we will do in the incursion:
PRE SCHOOL
Merelyn will start by meeting and greeting the children, introducing herself, and exploring with them the different sorts of families, how we all fit into families, and why she wrote the story. She will sing her song To The Moon and Back to the children and then take the children on an adventure with ‘To the Moon and Back – Grandma’s Rocket Ship Adventure’. We will then re enact the story with the fun of costumes according to their age level. Merelyn will engage the children in story writing and the use of our imagination. We will also use movement, instruments and music to explore story writing, encouraging each child to participate.
In all classes Merelyn will leave a template of a book for the children to continue to work on their stories, encouraging on-going thinking and creativity, and extending the benefits of the incursion into the week that follows, allowing teachers and educators to develop the ideas further.
FOUNDATION, GRADES 1 AND 2
Merelyn will start by meeting and greeting the children, introducing herself, and exploring with them the different sorts of families, how we all fit into families, and why she wrote the story. She will sing her song To The Moon and Back to the children and then take the children on an adventure with ‘To the Moon and Back – Grandma’s Rocket Ship Adventure’. We will then re enact the story with the fun of costumes according to their age level. Merelyn will engage the children in story writing and the use of our imagination. In reference to each age level we will then write a story together talking about the beginning (orientation) middle (complication) and ending (resolution) and develop the characters according to their imagination and creativity. For Grades 1 and 2 she will introduce story boarding and talk about how they can write their own books.
In all classes Merelyn will leave a template of a book for the children to continue to work on their stories, encouraging on-going thinking and creativity, and extending the benefits of the incursion into the week that follows, allowing teachers and educators to develop the ideas further.
