Weslandia

I have not done a book of the week for a while so I thought I would share what we have read and worked on last week.

Weslandia - Paul Fleischman - Weslandia is a tale of a boy who does not fit in at school.

He is different, he does not like what other boys like and he finds it hard with no friends.

Wesley has to find a summer project and he embarks on making a whole new civilisation.

The focus on this book for us and why I chose it was two fold really, firstly it fits in perfectly with our project on calendars as sundials are mentioned and secondly it highlights the fact that Wesley is different.

The twins have a hard time on the street where we live due to them being home educated and not spending their time with the other kids in school, all the kids are familiar with each other due to the fact they go to the same schools.

Oliver is also constantly having remarks about his hair being long and he gets called a girl a lot, not that it bothers him, he understands that people can be critical and make horrible comments due to their ignorance and non tolerance of difference, he see's that as a weekness in those people and not himself, so he never gets bothered by their hurtful words.

This book demonstrates that being different sometimes requires bringing people into your world, it is all well and good fitting into other people's worlds, but sometimes to share yours can be something special and can add quality to someone else's life.

This book is a great life lesson book on tolerance and understanding and how to counteract that by opening your differences up and becoming accessible to others.

We had great conversations about this book and talked about civillisations and some of the contecnts and what we already knew about the things Wesley had incorporated into his civillisation.

There are also some great worksheets online covering comprehension.

The worksheets I found where for older kids, so far to old for mine, so I took some ideas and created my own, which you are welcome to download here or click on the picture.

We talked about what our own civilisations would look like, and I have left them with that thought to come up with their own civilisations, lets see what they come up with....