Reading & Workshop Discussion - Week 5

This weeks readings consisted of:

Kadjer, Sara B 2006, What is digital storytelling? Bringing the outside in: visual ways to engage reluctant readers, Ch. 2 p 17-25

Nilsson, Eleanor 1992 Novels and short stories (11+ years): the organisation of your story, Writing for children, Ch. 5 p 83-117

Our task was to prepare some notes summarising the key points to inform our own writing and creation of a digital narrative for our upcoming assignment.

Kadjer - Key Points
- There are seven elements of effective digital stories:

• Point of View
• Dramatic Question
• Emotional Content
• Voice
• Soundtrack
• Pacing and, 
• Economy

- Stories take us somewhere; work towards a 'point'
- Narratives lead the reader to become interested in a compelling question
- Good stories breathe and effectively use pacing
- Use technologies as tools that bring elements together in one text

In the classroom;
- remind students that they are not learning a new technology; they are using a technology to learn
- encourage students that their story is worth telling
- offer broad topics and idea starters to help students begin their narratives

Nilsson - Key Points
- Making a start is the hard part for beginner writers
- Students learn to write by studying good models
- Stories can be introduced by the character, the plot, image or plot and character
- A beginning passage can spark a short writing exercise or go on to become a full story
- Don't make it too easy for your character to find a resolution; make one small idea last out a whole novel
- If a writer knows his/her characters inside and out, there can be something predictable about the story
- Beginning writers often skip the climax because by the time they get to it they just want to wrap it up
- There is often an ending or 'rounding off' after the climax that the writer needs to make sense of the events
- It is not the material that makes a story interesting but the way it is presented

Workshop Preparation
We were asked after these readings to create our own narrative based on a fairy tale. We were asked to retain the plot but change the setting, characters or resolution.

We came up with a version of Cinderella, The Three Little Pigs and one group member even created an entirely unique narrative, including picture and text. It was interesting to see throughout the class the variety of ideas that people came up with. Given that we could alter any aspect of the narrative it gave great scope for creativity while still maintaining elements of the original story.

After discussing the readings and preparation we viewed this years winner of Tropfest, which was a seven minute movie titled, 'Lemonade Stand'. This was a great example to further inspire the creation of our upcoming digital narratives, and reinforced some of the key points from the readings.

Most importantly for us to note was that, 'it is not the material that makes a story interesting, but the way it is presented' (Nilsson, 1992).

References

Kadjer, Sara B 2006, What is digital storytelling? Bringing the outside in: visual ways to engage reluctant readers, Ch. 2 p 17-25

Nilsson, Eleanor 1992 Novels and short stories (11+ years): the organisation of your story, Writing for children, Ch. 5 p 83-117

Sally's Adolescent Novel 2/5

James and the Giant Peach

By Roald Dahl

Illustrated by Quentin Blake

James and the Giant Peach is another narrative by Roald Dahl which tells the story of James, a young boy who happily lived on the English seaside with his parents until they were tragically killed by a rhinoceros! James was then forced to go and live with his two horrid aunts, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. They treated James horribly. One day a strange thing happened, a giant peach began to grow, and it grew and grew until it was the size of a house. James decides to venture inside the peach where he meets a number of new friends including a grasshopper, a spider, a ladybug, an earthworm, a centipede, a glowworm and a silkworm. Together they escape James’s horrid aunts and embark on a great adventure in which they travel to New York.

This story has the ability to engage and challenge both young and older readers. Dahl creates a whimsical world throughout his stories and encourages the readers to use their imagination and challenges their literacy skills and comprehension through the language he uses.

Dahl engages the reader in the story through the descriptive language he uses in order to introduce and establish the characters and their personalities. This is particularly evident in the introduction of James’ aunts, as Dahl uses words which allow the reader to understand Aunt Spikes dominating, cruel, malicious nature. He uses language in order to describe her physical appearance by explaining she is tall and thin, almost emaciated, with steel glasses. Whereas Aunt Sponge physical appearance is the opposite, as Dahl describes she is a lazy, greedy, selfish, and morbidly obese woman, and equally as cruel and repulsive as her sister. This descriptive language allows the reader to truly understand who these women are and makes the reader truly despise them.

The language Dahl uses is exquisitely accompanied by the illustrations by Blake, as they beautifully depict what Dahl conveys in the text. Blake’s illustrations add humour and depth to text and allow the reader to truly visualize the story, which helps in holding the readers attention throughout the whole book.

An overriding theme throughout Dahl’s work, particularly between this text and the previously analysed BFG is the basic plots used. This text follows the same basic plots as The BFG, which are ‘overcoming the monster’ and ‘quest’ plot. This is demonstrated in this text as James must escape his evil aunts in order to begin his journey to New York. This displays a common theme throughout Dahl’s work, which is the idea of young children, both James and Sophie (The BFG) overcoming hurdles and beating the villains. This is a key idea throughout Dahl’s work which makes them favorites among both young and old, as he empowers young people by making them the ‘hero’ in the story.

This text presents several ideas and activities which could be integrated within the classroom. This includes the obvious links to literacy, as well as links with science through the insects which are characters in the book, drama as it could be created into a performance and art as the story and illustrations allow children to express themselves creatively.  

Sally's Adolescent Novel 1/5

The BFG

By Roald Dahl

Illustrated by Quentin Blake

The BFG by Roald Dahl (1989) is a narrative which tells the story of Sophie, a little girl from an orphanage. One night Sophie is snatched from the orphanage by a giant called the BFG, which stands for the Big Friendly Giant. The BFG was wandering the streets engaging in mysterious activities before he whisked Sophie away to Giant Country. Sophie is relieved when she learns that the BFG collects, catalogues and delivers pleasant dreams to young children. Although the mean giants who also live in Giant Country travel the country every night and eat people! Sophie decides the mean giants must be stopped, although she doesn’t think that the BFG and her alone will be able to stop them. Sophie then comes up with a plan to mix up a dream to tell the Queen of England what the mean giants are doing. The plan is successful and with the help of the Queen and the armed forces they are able to defeat the mean giants.

As discussed by Gamble & Yates (2008) narratives commonly follow one or more of the seven basic plots. The BFG displays common ideas from both the ‘overcoming the monster’ and ‘quest’ plot. This is demonstrated in the book through the quest that the BFG and Sophie go on in order to overcome the mean giants.

A key factor of this text that both develops the characters personality as well as allows the reader to analyze the language and grammar used is the BFG’s dialogue. The BFG ‘can’t speak proper English’ which establishes and innocent quality to his personality which creates a beautiful contradiction through the BFG’s huge size and presence in comparison to his child-like mind. This is shown in the text when the BFG states,

“I is tired” and when he asks “Is I right or left?”.

This dialogue also allows students to analyze the text and identify the errors that the BFG has made and describe why he is incorrect.

A crucial element to this text is the illustrations as they perfectly depicted the story and create a unified text, which engages the reader and sparks their imagination. The reader is also engaged through the language that Dahl has used as throughout the story as he introduces a range of ‘new words’ which include frobscottle, snozzcumbers and jabbscottled. All of these words engage the reader and allow them to become intrigued and simulated by the story and the ‘sillineness’ of the words. The mean giants names are also creative and engage the reader as they include descriptive names such as; The Fleshlumpeate, The Bonecruncher, The Manhugger, The Childchewer, The Meatdripper, The Gizzardgulper, The Maidmasher, The Bloodbottler and The Butcher Boy. All of these descriptive names describe the horrible characters and allow the reader to visualize the giants and their terrible behavior simply through their names.

This is a great text to be used with primary students and high school students as it can be explored in a variety of ways to suit the outcomes and needs of the students. The whimsical quality of this story allows teachers to promote creativity and imagination as well as develop literacy and language skills.

References:

Gamble, N. & Yates, S. 2008, ‘Narrative: Narration and Structure’ in Exploring Children’s Literature, SAGE, pp. 45-77.

Reading & Workshop Discussion - Week 6

This weeks readings consisted of chapters 2 and 6 from;

Winch, G., Ross Johnston, R., March, P., Ljungdahl, L. & Holliday, M. 2010, Literacy: Reading, Writing & Children’s Literature, 4^th edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, Australia.

Before the workshop we were required to use the ‘Chapter Highlights’ to organise our notes for each chapter by using these as headings. A brief summary is demonstrated below:

Chapter 2 – Towards a Model of Reading

The Context and Purpose:

- Texts are constructed within a social and cultural context.

- We read to serve a purpose and to get things done.

- We use our reading skills differently with different types of text.

Selecting Texts:

-  Effective readers select the right text.

- We know that texts are different depending on the purpose they are designed to fulfil. 

- The text-types we know and use today evolved to meet the social purposes we wanted these texts to perform.

The Reading Cues and Systems or Sources of Information:

- Cue systems supply the reader with information to construct meaning.

- We use information from four different sources to construct meaning from the text we are reading.

-  Cue systems – semantic information (meaning is in the text and the mind of the reader), grammatical information (allows the reader to predict what word might come next), phonological-graphological information (describes links between sounds and letters) and visual/pictorial information (combine meaning from both visual and print elements to construct meaning).

Literacy Practices:

- The skills include; code breaking practices, text-participant practices, text user practices and text-analyst practices.

The Basic Strategies of Reading:

- Effective readers know and use effective processing strategies.

-  Metacognitive strategies include; skimming, scanning, sampling, predicting, confirming, understanding and correcting errors.

Effective Reading:

- Effective reading is a complex thinking activity.

- Interactive cognitive task.

- Readers work to solve a text and construct meaning using a range of different but interlinked reading practices.

Chapter 6 – The Reader and the Text

Different types of text:

- Texts can be classified in two broad categories; literary or factual.

-  Literary text types include stories, poetry, plays, films, and TV dramas.

-  Factual text types include textbooks, newspaper, TV news bulletins, recipe books.

- Some texts include elements of both text types.

- Knowing about different types of texts helps us read.

Concepts about print:

-  Readers need to know the conventions the govern how text is presented.

- When we read we participate in a process of decoding the print into language and ideas we can understand.

- Understanding the conventions (English reading left to right).

Text and the locus of meaning:

- We bring our own understanding and world knowledge to the task of constructing meaning from a text.

- Whenever we read we interact with ideas and information in a text that has been written for a specific purpose within a particular social context.

Context and text:

- Texts are embedded in contexts in which they ‘do their work’.

- One useful way of considering the impact of the type of text on a reader’s construction of meaning is to look at how texts function within different cultural and situational contexts.

Reading literary texts:

- Literary texts are an important part of an effective reading program.

- Literary texts engage us in the pleasure and excitement of entering ‘the world of the book’.

Reading factual text:

- Factual texts sometimes present challenges for readers.

- Purpose; tell facts, instruct, argue, compare views, recount.

- Analysing factual texts will identify what features need to be taught to students.

Selecting texts for the reading program:

- The selection of texts for each part of the reading program plays an important role in a students reading success.

- Must include; literary, factual, everyday and digital.

- Shared reading (discussion), guided reading (instructional), independent (enjoyment).

Matching text to students needs:

- Texts must match students needs, challenge them, educate them, interest them.

- The texts must match the context in which the students are using them.

Discussion Summary:

Throughout the workshop our group discussed these chapters and the key ideas that were presented. We concluded that throughout these chapters Winch et al. (2010) highlights and emphasises the importance of recognising and understanding the context and purpose of a text, the cueing systems, effective reading, the different types of text and how to select and match texts to students. We all agreed that these chapters played a crucial role in the development of our conceptual understanding of reading and texts, as it provided an in depth look at the concepts, provided examples and related the ideas to students and classroom practices. This allowed us to relate the concept of reading to real life experiences and encouraged us to consider the crucial role reading and texts will play in our own classrooms in the future.