Friday, March 11, 2011
This morning’s session at Paihia couldn’t have gone better. Adam and I introduced the script using Room 5’s new interactive whiteboard. Their script is funny and fun to read aloud.
Then, for the rest of the morning, Adam ran his normal programme, in which he’d incorporated reading a play aloud practice, and the children worked with me in small groups on a second draft of their script, so that we could ensure that ideas from everyone’s are included and everyone is involved in the editing the draft to make it even funnier.
For example, one boy, who is really intelligent, but who has fairly severe dyslexia (according to the principal), contributed the insight that the names of the two alien characters (Blob and Blobbie) were too close and a potential source of confusion to anyone listening. He changed “Blobbie” to “Lobby”. What I love about this is that it shows that he really does understand how a reader’s theatre play works. Other children added fun words from their initial thinking, such as “oozing” and “slime”. (Everyone had captured their initial ideas and thinking on a topic web.) Others zeroed in on the idea of adding voice directions (in italics between parentheses) and added some great ones. They worked out where they could make the play easier to read aloud with these voice directions. You really know that you are dealing with play writers when a year five student is explaining to you what she is adding “(to himself)” at a certain place in the script to remind the reader to talk softly at that point.
The final result is genuinely funny and it really does convey some basic safety messages in an engaging way. What I love about the way things have gone is that no one has been left behind. Every student has contributed ideas and text and every single student has improved the script during the editing process. This keeps the script theirs – tit expresses their ideas using their words – and even the most challenged students contributed to the different stages in the writing process (sorting out their ideas, starting to put the pieces together, and then improving the result).
On Monday, Room 5 plans to rehearse Earth’s Weird, so that they can present it (with just their voices).
And everyone is going to illustrate a copy, as a step towards the storyboard follow-up that Adam is planning.
In the second session at Russell School, Eveleen’s class thought about the feedback they’ve received from the School Journal editor and then they made a class decision that most of the students will write their own articles, while six students will work in small writing team pairs. Each individual (or team) then chose one of the ideas that we’d brainstormed (or came up with a new one), and the individual writers (or teams) began to use a topic web to capture some their thinking about a catchy working title, a (very specific) setting, some key words they could use, three key events to incorporate (how their journey starts, something that develops the journey – that keeps it moving, and an event that shows how the journey ends), and the characters (including, the viewpoint character who will be “telling” the reader about the journey).
It was a warm Friday afternoon, so they did well to get started with what is a fairly challenging task. Building up a topic web is a good way to break an idea down into discrete, manageable steps, but it is none-the-less challenging in its own right. I love the way the students immediately began to figure out some research priorities for the weekend. One boy, for example, knows that Northland has some of the Earth’s largest earthworms. His article is going to be about a journey into the bush to find one. He’s already worked out some terms to use for a Google search to find out more about them. The principal is going to show him a photographs of some of these worms that they found on a recent school camp. He plans to do a journey into the bush one night this weekend with his family to see if they can find one of the phosphorescent slime trails that these worms reportedly leave on the forest floor.
Another boy has come up with the catchy working title, “From School to Plate”. He wants to write about the journey of a kahawai from a school of fish to sitting beside some chips, ready to be eaten at his house after he’s caught the fish! To research this “journey”, he’s planning to go fishing from the rocks, in order to work out some of the details to write about, such as whether to use bait or a lure. Two girls want to write about a soldier who went overseas during World War II who served in the Long Range Desert Patrol. They know there is a photograph of him and information about him at the RSA, which is just a few doors down the street from the school. They want to find out where his journey ended, in Libya or in one of Russell’s cemetery? Another girl is planning to write an article about a journey from Russell to Paihia on the ferry. In the staffroom afterwards, Eveleen and William realised that, after fifty years, one of the ferries is about to make its final run later this month. (I was able to tell her this on Saturday when we ran into each other at the Kororareka Day celebrations. Her article about a journey has become “Bay Belle’s Last Run” and she’s going to ask the principal to help get onto the last run.)
On Monday, we need to keep reminding ourselves that non-fiction writing isn’t just about writing extended text. It includes features such as headings and sub-headings, maps, labelled diagrams, breakouts, flow charts, and photographs with captions. We then want the students to use storyboards to plan the components of their articles to write. How many photographs will they need? Would a map help? Or would a diagram help to convey the ideas they want to get across? How about a recipe? What about obtaining permission to photograph the photograph of the soldier from the RSA and then writing a photograph acknowledgment? The two girls found where Libya is on a map of Africa on the Internet, but what about creating a map to show how the soldier got from New Zealand to North Africa? With some people still assembling their ideas using a topic web and then a storyboard, we’ve got lots to do! It is great that such interesting and specific-to-Russell-and-Northland ideas are coming through though.
Don Long
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