Giraffes Can’t Dance
Written by Giles Andreae and illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees,
Giraffes Can’t Dance is a book about a
Gerald the Giraffe. The outline of the story indicates early on that Gerald cannot
dance, which is something he is unhappy about which sets the complication in
motion. As the story progresses, Gerald encounters other animals that live
beside him in the jungle, and speaks with them about how they dance and how
they learnt themselves. Eventually he finds a way to train himself into
learning how to dance which brings about a positive resolution to the story,
where he now fits in with the rest of his fellow jungle animals.
This book is written in third person narration, with the
basic elements of a narrative structure to the story which are quite prevalent
and easy to distinguish, with the majority of the book concentrating on the
complication aspects of the story. One main feature of this short picture book
that stood out to the reader is the way the author has used poetic text
throughout the story for the entire book.
By the author incorporating poetry to describe the story, it
allows the reader to embrace an acoustic feel when listening to this story when
read aloud. There is a rhythm to the story when read aloud giving the
students/listener a different perspective of the text in relation to the
illustrations which are highly detailed in this book. This book exposes
students to ‘graphophonics’ which are the sounds and look of words, as well as
semantic processes used in this book, meaning that words of their discourses
are much fewer than the words of their stories.
This book would be suited towards a lower primary level as
it introduces to students poetic text, and can be used to describe the concepts
of rhythm and rhyming texts.
No comments:
Post a Comment