Catherine- Post 9 Harry Potter

                                                                    Blog Posting 9- Harry Potter

 

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K Rowling is the first book in the Harry Potter series. This book starts of the story of Harry’s life and him settling down and making friends in his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry soon learns who to trust and who not to and about obeying the school rules. The author has done a great job of creating a life-like representation of the main characters in their descriptions. Harry is

 

I think this book would be a great resource as it a great chapter book, winning a number of honourable awards and has been translated into different languages. The book itself follows a great narrative structure and for those students interested in this topic would be a challenging text and keeps the reader thinking. The teacher would be able to use this book as a class text to deconstruct and teach students about different language features and techniques shown throughout.

 

Catherine

Catherine - Post 8 The Tale of Peter Rabbit

                                                     Week 8 Blog Posting- The Tale of Peter Rabbit

 

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter is about a rabbit called Peter who lived with his mother and his three sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail. They lived in a sand-bank underneath the root of a very big fir-tree. They were allowed to go down the lane and into the fields, but were no matter what they were never allowed to enter Mr McGregor’s Garden. Mrs Rabbit would tell her rabbits their father had an accident there and was put into a pie by Mrs McGregor. Mrs Rabbit went out to the bakery and told her young rabbits to be careful and stay out of trouble. Peter didn’t listen to his mother and went straight to Mr McGregor’s garden and squeezed under the gate. First he ate some lettuces, then some beans and radishes. As he walked around the corner of a garden bed he met Mr McGregor. He jumped up and chased Peter calling out, ‘Stop thief!’. Peter ran all over the garden and couldn’t find the gate, getting tangled up in a gooseberry net. As Mr McGregor came up to catch Peter he managed to break out of the net and jumped into a watering can. Peter managed to escape and run home. He never looked back until her reached home.

 

The Tale of Peter Rabbit would be a great book to use in a junior primary classroom as it has good illustrations which match the text.  It familiarises younger children with new words which the teacher can introduce one by one and defining the meanings. Children can also be asked to think about what they think will happen on the next page or what they can tell from the name and front cover.        

 

Catherine

Ben’s 9th Post

In this post I will discuss a children’s novel called ‘The day the sheep showed up’. It is a chapter book aimed at junior primary children, with simple language, medium sized text and illustrations that largely reinforce the events of the written text. The story follows a narrative structure, where complications arrive for the barnyard animals when they awake to find a creature they have never seen before in their yard. They set about trying to categorise the unknown animal by comparing it to themselves,

‘It’s white like you, it must be a goose. It’s got four legs like you, it must be a pig.’

They conclude their comparisons by deducing that the sheep is just another barnyard animal like them and set about playing tag together and noting how the sheep gets tired just like them.

Although the book presents a simple story, beneath it lies a deeper message of acceptance and non-discrimination, which when presented in an easy to follow narrative, allows for students to make thoughtful connections and offers a focus for reflection. Given this deeper level of meaning, the story could be used as a resource for upper primary year levels when discussing tolerance and acceptance.

Ben’s 8th post

The next book I chose to include in this blog is a children’s picture book called ‘Who is the world for?’ written by Tom Pow and illustrated by Robert Ingpen. This book follows the form of baby animals from different environments asking their parent the philosophical question of ‘who is the world for?’ The parent then responds with a statement of wondrous and beautiful things in their habitat concluding with statement ‘The world is for you’.

The story concludes with the reflected imagery of a father and son at bedtime, and the son echoing the question of ‘who is the world for?’ The father then refers to all of the animals and the babies shown in the earlier pages and concludes that the world is for all of these but also ‘the world is for you.’ It appears to be written as a potential story to wind down before bed for parents with young children, but I think there are deeper elements to the book that could be used in a school environment.

The illustrations are prepared with care and have great realism depicting abundant detail in the varied environments. The animals are portrayed majestically, but are also shown with vulnerability to the threat of their habitat being lost by human influence. Due to these conveyed messages I feel this book is appropriate for an environmentally focussed unit in SOSE. 

Ben’s 7th post

This week I was very pleased to discover and read the children’s book Tough Boris by Mem Fox. What really impressed me about this book was the bulk of the story was told through the illustrations, while the written words gave only very simple statements about the main character on each page. This narrative technique of using the images to do the majority of the story telling was discussed in week 5 of the course and really stood out to me.

This story is constructed in such a way that it almost feels like you are reading two versions of the book at the same time. The written text is very simple and seems aimed at very young readers where it follows a pattern of repetition when describing Tough Boris.

 ‘He was massive, all pirates are massive. He was greedy, all pirates are greedy’.

Kathryn Brown's illustrations on the other hand must be studied for some time to get a fuller understanding of the characters and their motivations and feelings. The illustrations use suggestive methods to get you wondering about what is happening, and you eventually discover a much deeper narrative with denser character development. The images tell the story of a cabin boy who was taken from his home against his will, and the cruel Pirate captain has a change of heart when his parrot dies, and decides to return the boy to his home and let him go free. There is further complication when the boy is depicted as being very sad to go home after growing fond of his life at sea.

I found it quite enlightening to discover a book with so much meaning depicted in the images, and I feel this book could be used with middle years students to get them analysing a text outside of comprehension of written words.

Catherine- Week 7 Robert the Rose Horse

Robert the Rose Horse by Joan Heilbroner is a children’s fiction picture book about Robert the Horse. Robert lives on a farm and is readily exposed to roses. Roses make Robert sneeze, not any old sneeze but a huge KERCHOO. Robert thinks his only option is to move to the city to get away from roses. Once moving to the city Robert gets a job as a working for a milk man, taking the milkman and his wagon around the city. On his trip around the city one day, Robert came across a man with a rose in his jacket. Robert sneezed and the wagon and milk went everywhere. Robert was fired from his job. He then began to look for a job again. After many days Robert found a poster advertising for police horses. Robert rushed in and got the job. He was very proud of his job. One day he sees a bank robbery, managing to find a rose and stop the robbers with his sneeze. Robert was a hero and given some roses to say thank you, but he didn’t sneeze. Robert managed to sneeze away his allergy to roses.

 

I think this book would be a very good teacher resource in a primary classroom as it is very funny and will keep students engaged whilst teaching them morals and underlying messages. This book conveys morals to the reader such as having allergies doesn’t have to hold you back from your achievements, use it to your advantage. Alliteration is used throughout the text with the repetition of a letter in a sentence such as ‘The robbers ran right at Robert’. Assonance is also used throughout the text to demonstrate same vowel sounds that are repeated closely together ‘He took the milk man and his wagon all around the city’. The author also uses onomatopoeia with words such as KERCHOO and SPLASH to make the reading of this text more interesting.

Catherine

Ben's Workshop overview for week 7

This week’s lecture from Lyn centred on enabling children to become Text-Users and Text-Analysts, as well as unpacking for them the basic elements of a different texts, such as procedural texts, and classifying texts. The lecture gave numerous points of interest to take away, especially the prompt to provide students access to a wide range of texts, and particularly ones that are relevant to their lives. This important point is easily overlooked, and can advance the student’s ability to make meaning from texts they will encounter, and advance them towards becoming text-analysts.

In the workshop we discussed the traditional linear methods of teaching literacy, which began with teaching sounds, then moving onto words, then sentences and onward up to meaning. Where as newer research that began in the 70s, now show the non-linear reading methods of competent readers, such as scanning for meaning and filling in the gaps as required. Competent readers were also noted as having the ability to self-correct and ask questions around how the text sounds, how it looks and does it make sense.

We recapped the cueing systems, which included Visual cues that focused on the look of the text and images, Graphophonic cues that focus on the sound of the words, Semantic cues that deal with the meaning of the text and Syntactic cues which deal with the order of the words to produce meaning.

The newspaper article activity and the breakfast cereal activity also were useful examples of creating a questioning disposition in children, as we unpacked the aims of the journalist and the advertisers, as they in their own way try to convince and persuade the reader of something.