Cool School

Cool School is a fictional brochure advertising Cool School. The brochure describes the school’s beach, forest, and farm, the interesting timetable, the cool staff, what kids say about the school, and how much it costs (free!). The story includes text features like speech bubbles, visual schedules, and captions.

Cool School is designed to be a full brochure where each page discusses a different part of the brochure. Critical thinking questions are provided to guide the reader. Illustrations match the text by visually showing what the brochure is talking about. A visual information guide is provided for teachers to draw students’ attention to the graphics, style, font, and text highlighters as well as the information, layout, and design of the brochure. There is an infographic at the end of the story outlining the purpose and procedures for designing a brochure. An activity on designing a brochure for their own Cool School is provided for teachers to extend students’ learning.

Readers develop vocabulary such as nouns (canoe), verbs (surf), and singular/plural (school/schools). Opportunities arise to discuss parentheses, colons, abbreviations (Mr L), and apostrophes within contractions (there’s). Focus on short and long vowel i, the suffix ist (specialist), and base words (amazing).

This title is from the Sails Literacy series. Hook readers and ignite their curiosity - over 850 levelled texts with bright, colourful, sophisticated designs.