This can sometimes be the genre that is the most difficult for us to find examples of to use with children. That tells us something. It tells us that in ‘real life’ you don’t find explanations on their own. They are ususally part of another text such as a report and therefore make a hybrid text.
I know that many teachers write their own explanatory texts to use with children. Is it right that we simplify and use texts that wouldn’t appear in real life?
So here is a small list of explanatory texts that I think are worth using.
My all time favourite is Until I Met Dudley by Roger McGough and Chris Riddell. The book explains how every day things work; a double page spread about how it might work followed by a double page spread of Dudley explaining how it really works. This makes a wonderful model for children to create a booklet about an object with an imaginary and a real explanation.
The great website How Stuff Works is usually the next place that I go to for an explanation as I can often find things that the children are interested in. The last things I used were Christmas Lights and Bicycles. I have to say that the articles do have really good introductions so if that is an aspect that your class find difficult to write, the site is well worth looking at.
How Dogs Really Work by Alan Snow is a very funny book. I have had children acting out the imaginary explanation of a dog’s digestive system and writing their own for a cat. This book uses diagrams well to support the writing. There are others in the series but they are not quite such good explanations.
If I want something for the class to write about I find myself going back time and time again to the patent websites. How about the invention to see your own ear wax and other strange patents. Other ways to support children in capturing what to write about are to use film clips of machines etc that the children can explain. The Shirt Machine is often used as are various machines from Wallace and Gromit. How about the Getting Wallace up Machine or the Tellyscope Machine? (Spot the missing apostrophe in Tellyscope!) To download these from YouTube to use in the classroom try Kickyoutube.
How about taking the marvellous Common Craft videos explaining a whole host of ideas and producing your own? The animation that they use is very accessible.
The strategies document about progression in explanatory texts is particularly useful, especially the final page which shows what we might aim for in each year group.
As part of our Talk for Writing training we have been focusing on non-fiction using the wonderful book Think of an Eel by Karen Wallace and Mike Bostock. The two voices in this book are very different; one a literary non-fiction with the most poetic language possible and the other a more formal report tone almost as captions.
There is so much to talk about in this book which makes it without question a text that teaches. When we started to create our non-fiction texts that teach, several of the books were dual-voiced. The power of this is that it makes it so much easier to introduce children to the idea of different voices when writing.
I recently came across Seahorse The Shyest Fish in the Sea by Chris Butterworth and John Lawrence which is another dual-voiced text. The book is beautifully illustrated with what look like prints and just like Think of an Eel tell the story of a life cycle. I love the way that it refers to the seahorse as Seahorse making it feel personal and the swaying of the more formal report voice to show us the movement of the waves.
This book would make a fantastic guided reading book for level 3 readers (UK National Curriculum) to be used during a unit of work based on Think of an Eel.
Have you used Think of an Eel in literacy? Let us know how it went. And do you know of any other powerful dual voiced texts?
This is an amazing book that I was introduced to via @Joga5 a few weeks ago. It is a rags to riches story of a young boy, Hugo who lives in a french train station and is building an automaton. How he came to be living where he does, have an automaton and generally survive are all part of this story that is told through words, hand-drawn images and stills taken from old film. This is a very clever way of weaving all three media together and makes for a real page-turner that I read in one go.
The story draws on old film and a real-life character George Melies, weaving fiction around them in a magical way.
Hugo is desperate to restore the automaton left by his father and the story rotates around his need to steal to obtain the parts necessary and the loss of the notebook that explains how the automaton was made.
What makes a rags to riches story?
We meet the hero in their lowly, unhappy state surrounded by dark figures who scorn them
The hero meets ordeals and overcomes them
Everything goes wrong. The hero is seperated form everything important to them and is in despair
The hero emerges from the despair and discovers an independent strength. This is put to the test.
They succeed and live happily ever after.
To get an idea of the book, watch this trailer.
Have you used this book at all in literacy? If so leave a comment about how it went.
I talked to a teacher on Wednesday who had been on Talk for Writing training and had read our thoughts aboutblueprints. She wanted to know how she could start to introduce the idea of blueprints to the whole school and embed Talk for Writing training with only one staff meeting to do so. We came up with lots of ideas that she couldn’t do and eventually hit upon the idea of taking one blueprint and using it across the whole school. So the one staff meeting could focus upon a blueprint and talk for writing ideas for using it in reading and writing.
We agreed that not only would it be one blueprint but the whole school would focus on one main story – Little Red Riding Hood, an overcoming the monster blueprint. There are lots of versions of Little Red Riding Hood and there are lots of innovations on this story – telling it from the wolf’s point of view, adding other characters and adding other subversive elements. It will be interesting to see if any of these books use a different blueprint because of the way they are retold.
So, here is my list of books/films/websites based around Little Red Riding Hood that are suitable for primary age children. I haven ‘t really gone for any of the traditional tales as schools will already have these.
Hoodwinked – the movie with lots of intertextual links and most primary aged children will have already seen it.
Visualising Little Red, a paper by Sarah Bonner about the images used in modern retellings of Little Red Riding hood
Added on the 04/01/10 Little Fred Riding Hood by Michael Cox
Little Red Riding Hood retold by Tony Ross
Beware of Boys by Tony Blundell
Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf by Catherine Storr
Little Red Riding Hood by Anne Walter
Red Riding Hood Rap by Penny Dolan
These books can be used in shared time and a great guided reading session would be for each child to take one of the titles and discuss how the books are the same and different. I look forward to seeing what they do.
If you know of any other stories based around Little Red Riding Hood please leave a comment.
One of the most read posts on this blog is the list of books that were suggested for guided reading. However, it was brought to my attention that some of the books are out of print or no longer available. It therefore seemed like a good time to update the list and to add some of the new books that I have come across. I am including those books that were on the previous list but are still available. Where possible I have also tried to repeat authors at each level. This means that children can experience an author more than once and can start to make links between their texts.
Books that might be suitable for level 3 (National Curriculum UK) readers:
Spells by Emily Gravett
The Cat Who got Carried Away by Allan Ahlberg
Finding Fizz by J Alexander
Dinner Ladies Don’t Count by Bernard Ashley
Marvin Redpost – Why pick on me? by Louis Sachar
The Boat by Helen Ward and Ian Andrew
The Wolf’s Story by Toby Forward and Izhar Cohen
War and Peas by Michael Foreman
Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett
I am the Mummy Heb-Nefert by Christina Buntin
P is for Pakistan by Shazia Razzak and Prodeepta Das (non-fiction)
Traction Man is Here by Mini Grey
Tadpole’s Promise by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross
Shortcut by David Macaulay
The Tunnel by Anthony Browne (level 3 to 5)
Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne (level 3 to 5)
Today was our second day of the animation project that we are taking part in. The teachers came with animations their children had made, were ready to discuss the learning that had taken place.
I have to say that the animations were fantastic and whilst we talked several things became clearer to me:
when working as a team you need to be effective at sharing the visual idea so that all can buy into it and understand what is to be achieved. I was however left with the question about what was the best way to do this. I suspect there is no one way that is the ‘best’ but ways that work for some more than others. Whatever it is, sketching, photographing, talking etc this leads to storyboarding and storyboarding is important.
group dynamics were important. Time and time again the teachers reported that the group that worked best together produced a quality animation. This illustrates the need to teach the skills of collaboration – not just expecting children to be able to do it. And probably these issues are barriers to learning generally not just animating.
managing the timing or speed of action was an important skill that needed further development. Pauses are important in animation and provide a sort of full-stop or break like a paragraph. It means that the animation is not action, action, action.
some groups had too much going on in their animation. I can only liken this to writing that goes on and on but doesn’t really go anywhere and the reader is not really sure what to focus on. The learning from this is that the children need to develop the idea of directing the viewer’s attention. Other groups didn’t have enough going on. I often read writing like this which is what I call minimalist. Again I think the children need to focus in on what they want their veiwer to ’see’.
This will inform how we develop our teaching of animation over the next few months.
As we are teaching animation at least three times across this year linked to poetry we then went onto look at how we could provide a different stimulus for the children and so started with sound.
We listened to three sounds, one at a time and talked around the images they generated for us. This was a fantastic activity because the longer we did it the less literal the images became and then it started getting interesting. From this sound we then created an animation and finally added the sound by exporting the images and importing into Movie Maker. Below are two of the results. We did have one crash and loss of work. It’s a painful way to learn to save, save, save.
I will write about the children’s animations in another post.
I thought that about twice a month I would offer a round-up of resources that I have come across via twitter or blogs as I usually end up with too many to blog about individually.
My favourite resource so far is this wonderful blog post of 50 digital fairy tale images. They are fantastic and I will be using them in all sorts of ways in my work. Thanks to @englishteach8 for the retweet via @LatestWeb about them.
I came across Perform a Poem on twowhizzy’s delicious bookmarks. What a wonderful idea and resource for poetry teaching. As we are taking part in a poetry and animation project we will definitely be uploading some or our work to this site.
I heard about The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures from @Joga5 on his blog Ponderings and Musings. This rags to riches story is told through text, hand drawn images and photos from film and is very clever. I have ordered my own copy and hope to introduce it to some teachers fairly soon. You would need a visualiser to share this text with children.
I also came across this drama website from @Joga5. it is a wonderful place to get ideas for drama plus drama activities that you can use every day.
This has to be one of the best titles for a long time! A drove of bullocks by PatrickGeorge is the most beautifully designed non-fiction text around collective nouns.
I love an implausibility of gnus or a loveliness of ladybirds. Each double page spread illustrates the collective noun in a very clever, minimalist way with additional text explaining something about the animal.
This would be a great text for everyone to use in a literacy classroom but for those of you grappling with Talk for Writing this text would be superb. It would allow for a great deal of word play in devising collective nouns and the small amounts of text are a suitable amount for Yr2 or Yr3 pupils to use as a model for writing. The vocabulary choice is driven by the collective noun, e.g. for a business of ferrets we have active sleuth, snoop, getting down to business, attention span and repetitive rewards. Very appropriate!
There are many sites that play with collective nouns, here, here, here and here.
It would be great if a class made their own version of this book for people or objects in a classroom. The design aspect of each page would be very important.
What is your favourite collective noun? What would a collective noun be for bloggers – a boast of bloggers? Let me know.
What a lot Rebecca and I learned today and we were leading the course! We had been inspired by Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots for some time but it was the first time that we had a chance to share it with teachers.
So what did we learn?
In order for children to work with blueprints there are some ways of working that need to be in place and they are
Book talk to allow children to respond personally to a text. If you keep going for long enough and value all responses so much more comes out than you might expect
Comparing and contrasting texts which can be simply achieved by asking the question – have you come across anything else like this? This opens up the discussion for the links that children might make.
Sharing other texts that are like the particular blueprint that you are using which will allow you to collect and categorise. This helps to show children that blueprints are common patterns regardless of genre and culture.
In writing we found the blueprints helped children to invent stories. We started the inventing session as in this post but once people had decided what their characters were we asked them to attach what they had developed so far to a blueprint. We all had the same characters a woman who was selling shark burgers on the beach and a shark who wanted this to stop (don’t ask how we came up with this). People chose either the quest, tragedy or rags to riches and briefly worked out what would happen at each stage of the story.
The shark (sharky) saw the shark burgers being sold and decides he wants to stop it.
He sets off to do this by rounding up all the other sharks and convincing them to follow him to a safe place so they set off.
Things start to go wrong. It’s hard to find a safe place and shark burgers have become a world wide favourite and everyone wants them.
Shark hunting becomes a necessity to feed this hunger and because the sharks are all in one place they are easy to kill
Sharky and all of the other sharks are hunted to extinction
In fact I have paraphrased this last part. What was actually said (and please remember this was teachers) ‘They were all killed and the sea turned red with their blood’. So, what sort of blueprint do you think this group followed?
This is an oral activity. Once the story is agreed it is very easy to map it.
What this type of activity helped us to see is that very often when children invent their own text they frequently start off with a character and something happening to them but find it very difficult to work this through to a resolution. By starting with anchoring in a blueprint we can now begin to layer up with detail. We can think about how we want our readers to feel at each point of the story, we can think about how we reveal character through out the story, we can add clues as to what is going to happen because we are clear about the whole story, we can add a motif to run through the story, we can decide where the cliff hangers and hooks need to be. And we can start to elaborate at each point to our retelling.
One of the things that teachers wanted in order to continue their thinking about this was a place where they could start to collect books and their blueprints so I have set up two places. I am slowly writing posts that exemplify each blueprint and you can leave a comment sharing the title and author. Or you can go to our website and fill in a very simple form that will collate suggestions.
I am a big fan of David Macaulay and would use him as an author and illustrator to study because he has such a range of non-fiction and fiction that I think there is something for everyone. Macualay is obviously fascinated by the way things are constructed and how they work.
One of my favourite books is Shortcut. This tells the story of Albert and his trusty mare who are on their way to the market to sell their watermelons. The journey however, is not smooth and all sorts of things get in the way or go wrong and everything becomes very confused. Everything is eventually sorted and restored to its rightful place making it a great story to look at cause and effect. It is also a story that uses Christopher Booker’s blueprint of comedy. In this we have fives stages
two or more things or people are brought together
someone does something and everything becomes confused
My all time favourite is Until I Met Dudley
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Posted by alijoy
- by Lynn and David Roberts
by Ann Jungman
by Ann Jungman
by Ed Young – a chinese Little Red Riding Hood
by Niki Daly – a south african Little Red Riding Hood
by Patricia C MckIssack
by Toby Forward
by Lisa Campbell Forist
by Susan Hill – more poetry than prose
by Roald Dahl with the immortal lines ‘one eyelid flickers, she whips a pistol from her knickers’
by Gillian Cross – only suitable for Yr6+
here
from @Joga5 on his blog
by 
. This tells the story of Albert and his trusty mare who are on their way to the market to sell their watermelons. The journey however, is not smooth and all sorts of things get in the way or go wrong and everything becomes very confused. Everything is eventually sorted and restored to its rightful place making it a great story to look at cause and effect. It is also a story that uses Christopher Booker’s blueprint of comedy. In this we have fives stages
also follows the comedy blueprint.
