Thursday, March 10, 2011
How extraordinary. As I crossed on the Opua car ferry this morning, I noticed that some seagulls were hitching a ride across, saving themselves the energy-cost of the flight. The teachers at Opua School assure me that some ducks have learned this trick, too, and that one of the dogs in Opua regularly catches the ferry across for a wander on the Oikato side.
After a stunning formal welcome in te reo Maori from the whole school in the hall that included speeches, haka, and poi (to which I replied in te reo, including singing a waiata in reply), Margaret’s class brainstormed in writing groups ideas to write about along with safety messages to highlight within these incidents. We then used topic webs to focus our thinking about where these articles could be set, whom they would be about, key safety terms we might use, and we started to develop some working titles for our articles.
Transformed into research groups, each writing team is now going to identify a vital URL to use for a click-on and do further research into the safety issue highlighted in the incident that they’ve chosen to write about.
At the suggestion of NZTA, we’ve also arranged for the local police officer (who is also a parent and school board member) to quality assure the writing towards the end of next week, to ensure that everyone gets the safety issues right (particularly, alignment with the road code).
We also talked a bit about writing in general and, in response to a question, I passed on an idea Keri Hulme once shared with me – that if you keep a scrapbook of interesting, quirky news stories, fascinating overheard conversations, middle-of-the-night writing ideas, and so on, then this becomes a fantastic source for ideas to turn to whenever you get stuck when you’re writing and aren’t sure how to move on. One girl had already noticed this idea in something I’d written on the Internet.
At Paihia, we pulled together the elements of the script that Room 5 is developing. The ideas for Earth’s Weird are really good, but some of the students are really starting to struggle with the underlying skills of writing. It’s really tough to get down a three-line exchange between two characters, for example, if you can’t spell any of the words in the line you’ve just worked out with your partner and it is harder still to read it afterwards as a line in a script when every word … even very short, basic ones … are misspelled and some of the letters are incorrectly formed.
So Adam and I stopped while we were ahead and decided on a change of tack. Adam suggested that I finish the task of assembling the elements that the children have created and started to put together into a full draft tonight so that in the final two sessions Room 5 can move straight on to refining, illustrating, rehearsing, and presenting their play.
Taking Adam’s advice, this evening I took the elements the children developed, including the exchanges between characters that they had begun to develop, and assembled them into a simple script. I emailed the result to Adam tonight so that he can download it onto his interactive whiteboard for tomorrow.
Don Long
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