Week 7 Discussion Preparation, Maddy Deegan

The activities that where designed for this week had a specific focus on being able to develop students ability to be able to critically analyse a text and make connections that are both within the classroom situation and also students home lives. 

When looking at the different forms of media and text that are apart of everyday life it is necessary that students become discerning readers and are able to distinguish what can be seen as manipulation and what is honest text. 

Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Ma, Maddy Deegan Novel 5

Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Ma, Maddy Deegan Novel 5

Chinese Cinderella wrenched at my heart strings as Adeline Yen Mah wrote about her experiences growing up in China in the second world war. This novel is beautifully written and has created an emotional connection with the readers. I thought chinese cinderella was a fantastic novel and could be used within a number of classroom situations as a point of reference or discussion.

The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon, Maddy Deegan Novel 4

The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon, Maddy Deegan Novel 4

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night is a brilliantly structured novel for adolescents which touches on complex issues such as difference and being an outsider. Although the novel never explicitly refers to Aspergers or the autism spectrum it is inferred that the main character Christopher John Francis Boone is on the spectrum. His higher level of thinking, focus on particular things and his obsessions are described with such detail that you are apart of them. Although I do not usually like books narrated in the first person I found this to be enthralling. 

Looking for Alibrandi - Melina Marchetta, Maddy Deegan Novel 3

Looking for Alibrandi - Melina Marchetta

Looking for Alibrandi, is a novel that looks at a lot of different issues relating to adolescent life and the issues that students face in home and school life. The novel focuses on Jozzie, her life experiences, opinions  and how she grows as a person learning from the different people and elements in her life.
This novel is a brilliant teaching resource as it relates to a plethora of topic and subjects.

Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone - J.K Rolling, Maddy Deegan Novel 2

Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone is the first book in the Harry Potter series. The narrative structure, characterisation and use of description all form together to build a novel which captures your imagination and allows your to grow with the characters in their trials, tribulations and adventures which are new and exciting and allow the reader to participate.

Madeleine Deegan - Attack of the Mutant - Novel 1

Goosebumps - Attack of the Mutant, R.L Stine

Attack of the mutant is an adventure story that follows the love that Skipper Matthews has for comic books and the weird occurance of his loved comic book world coming to life. This novel follows the adventure narrative structure while also exuberayting a scary type feel when reading. I really enjoyed reading this novel and can see how it would appeal to a younger audience, as it captures you within the first few chapters, holds you attentions and relates to a popular interest amount adolescents.

'Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief'

'Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief' by Rick Riordan This book is engaging from the get go, as it drops the reader right smack bang in the middle of Percy Jackson's new and exciting life as a half-blood (half god, half mortal). The issues are quite serious, with Percy needing to save the world from warring Greek gods, but Riordan writes it in such a way that includes humour to lighten the mood. The use of humour really appeals to the adolescent reader, with chapter titles like, 'I Accidentally Vaporize My Teacher' and 'I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom'. Similar to the novel 'Henry Hoey Hobson', this novel has an underlying focus on the problems that adolescents face in terms of finding their identity and becoming responsible adults. The inclusion of historical names and places allows the book to be used as an engaging introduction into the Ancient Greek world and, therefore, is a great resource for the upper-primary, lower secondary classroom.

Final reading posts

I could not go past this book when I saw it in the library, I haven't read it since I was quite young so loved that I had an excuse to open up a this childrens book again.  This is one of my all time favourites- Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl and illustrations by Quentin Blake.

I'm sure everyone knows this story, but the book starts off introducing the three farmers, Farmer Boggis, Farmer Bunce and Farmer Bean.   This gives an insight to each mans farm and their personalities, here Dahl describes them as "nasty men" the illustrations also help the reader understand the physical characteristics of the farmers.  Each of which have been outsmarted by the clever, tricky Mr. Fox who lives underground beside a tree with his wife and his children.  Mr Fox makes nightly visits to the three farms and steals whatever is avaliable to him.  Tired of this, the farmers make a plan to shoot Mr. Fox, missing Mr. Fox they instead shoot off his tail. Not happy with this outcome the farmers plan to dig up his hole inorder to kill Mr. Fox. 

This also disturbs the other creatures living underground so in order to survive Mr. Fox makes another plot to gather food for the undergroud creatures (once again at three farmers farms). 
The creatures celebrate with a banquet (The great feast) of the 'stolen' foods and explains to the creatures they can live with him and his family and hunt for food like he does without the worry of hunter. While the three farmers are outside still waiting for Mr. Fox to emerge still with their loaded guns in hand.

In keeping with the Roald Dahl theme I decided to read The Magic Finger also illustrated by Quentin Blake as I actually have never had the opportunity to read this book.  I really like how the story is narrated by a girl who lives next door to the Gregg family.  The story focuses on this family and how they hunt ducks for fun. 

The girl achieves the power to punish people how make her unhappy with her "Magic finger" although she does not have complete control over his.  She finds it unfair that the Greggs are killing the ducks and so points her finger at them in anger.  The next day the Greggs wake up as miniture people with wings instead of arms and in their house is four large ducks with arms instead of their wings.  The family are forced out of their house decided to build a nest as a subsitute.  The next morning they awake to find the large ducks standing near their nest with guns drawn at them, just like the way the Greggs once hunted the ducks.   This makes the Greggs vow not to hunt again and inturn allows them to turn into their normal human bodies again, the family also decide to destroy their guns and to dig the ducks they already killed grave sights.  The Greggs even change their name to the Eggs.  Amoungst this the girl then hears another gun being fired, she leaves the Greggs by telling them that the family that let off the gun fired 'They'll be nesting in the trees tonight, every one of them!'.

The childrens novel chosen is 'Billionaire Boy' written by David Williams, the novel offers some scetches throughout the book which are illustrated by Tony Ross.


Billionare Boy is about a boy called Joe Spud. He is the richest boy in the world, althought this wasn't the case. Joe's father came up with the idea of scented toilet paper and opened the company of 'Bum fresh' which then expands and becomes a multibillion comany.  Joe has whatever he desires, from a  2 million dollars for his birhday, a crocodile, a theme park in his backyard to owning his own formula one track.  But Joe doesnt have something, something that he wants the most, something money can't buy.  A friend.   Joe therefore decides to change his life and move back in with his mother and become a 'normal' boy again in the hope to make new friends.

This was a very engaging book, I believe the inclusion of sketches throughout the book added to this.  The book also uses alot of 'slang' words to keep the young reader engaged, due to this factor if  I was to use this book in my classroom I would rather use this book as a shared reading for the class compared to a guided reading book due to the element of interaction with the reader. 


The second novel chosen is titled 'Louis Besides Himself' written by Anna Fienberg. 
This was initially a hard book to understand, as it was only until around the 3rd chapter the characters where really introduced the first two contained a lot of diagloue betweem the characters but they weren't fully established. 


The book follows the life of Louis who lives with his Dad and sister, Louis' mother died when he was a infant.  The being chapters discuss Louis's relationship with his father, with his dad into wrestling whereas Louis is much more interested in his books.  Louis also have troubles conneting with his friends as they are very much interested in different things and starts to believe that their friendship is drifting a part due to these differences.

Louis is confronted when he comes face to face with an intruder in his own house.  This intruder actually turns out to be a friend of Louis who has run away from her own personal family problems at home.    Through helping his friend stay at his home while she sorts out her own personal problems, Louis realises that him and his friends arent so different after all.  This novel covers issues of friendship, family and change and I found that this would be perfect for a young boy for independent reading.

week 7 summary

This week the group was divided due to some absences throughout the class.  I therfore sat with another group this week.  The discussion firstly started off with comparing the two different news articles on the same topic but writen by different journalists or different newspapers.   The group firstly looked at two articles on the recent Australian fallen diggers, the first article was looking at the need for our troops to return home and used frightening statistics and dark images to almost 'scare' the audience, whereas the second looked at rememerence of those who had fallen and refered to ANZAC DAY.  The images were a massive difference in the two. 

The first article was dark compared to the second that offered a wreath and a horizion and much brighter colours.  I brought up the differences of the two newspapers, the first written by 'The Australian' having a much larger audience and stating more facts and statistics whereas 'The Advertiser' was almost the opposite and mostly written by the authors opinions.  The articles I brought discussed the recent death of the Dutch tourist who was killed while trying to break up a fight in front of a Gawler pub.  Both the articles were writen on the 'Adelaide Now'website, but wrote about two very different topics.  The first had a more emotional connection with the reader focusing on the family of the man, whereas the second focused on the owners of pubs in Gawler calling on a need to close earlier and offered opinions of Government members.  Here we focused on the headlines, images, the words used such as choice of verbs, nouns and adjectives and also who we thought the articles were written for. 

The next activity was to show our two different cereal boxes.  Here I was the only member of the group who brought in cereal boxes, Rice Bubbles and Coca Pops.  Here our main discussion focused on 'who are these cereals aimed at?  we all concluded that both the brands where focused on children, with activities being provided on the box and the many childrens competitions they provided on the box.  A member of the class from another table discussed how she had focused on the nutrition chart on the cereal box which then led to a class discussion about the reading practices we may have been using as explained in this weeks readings.

Our next activity was to read a small text on 'Archaeology and Technology' as a text user.  firstly we were asked to skim read for one minute before making brief notes of what we had just read.  Lyn then asked us to re-read the text and 'scan' to find certain words, this was quite a difficult task.  Finally we were to put the text away and were to answer four questions based on the text. 

The final activity was to look at a book on 'Keeping Silk Worms'  and to determine the difference between guided reading and shared reading.   As a group we slowly went through the book and discussed that it was quite a difficult topic, we felt that the students should have some prior knowledge on the topic of silk worms or this would not make any sense to the children.  We felt this would be used in the middle of a topic and discussed cerain words that would have to be taught explicitly to the children.  Through this we found that a shared reading would be most appropriate for the book.  The book was broken into contents, pictures and processes which could stimulate great class disscussion and could get the students involved by asking questions and having the students use their prior knowledge.  This was a very packed session and therefore we didnt get time to discuss our individual reading novels and picture books.

 

This was one interesting book! (I really wanted to read it since it is set in Tacoma, which is only about 30 minutes from where I live.)

Josh and Aaron Peshik's family move into a house that is very odd. For example, the floors are all slanted or "tilting". They don't know why. And there are strange words and scientific notes and equations that are written on the walls. Plus there is a talking rat and his family. Despite all these odd things, Josh and Aaron really want to stay in this house. Othe...moreTTheThe"The Tilting House" by Tom Llewellyn is a childrens novel.  The book focuses on two young boys Josh and Aaron whose  family move into a extremely strange house.

 

The family experiences strange notes, words and even equations written on the walls of the house, a talking rat and the floors are slanted or "tilting" hence the title of the book.  Despite the strange house Aaron and Josh are quite fond of it and prefer it to the madness of their old life.  Josh and Aaron feel they need to solve the unknown mysteries of the house before things become any worse.

 

This was an extremely interesting book.  I was originally only going to read the first chapter but I couldnt put the book down due to its odd characteristics and to find out the mysteries of the house and why it was how it was. This would be a good book to use as a shared reading book as it is very engaging even for a person of my age.

Workshop Preparation Discussion, Week 7 (Petrina)

The activities this week would be particularly useful in assisting students to become more critically literate text-analysts, especially since the texts chosen are everyday artefacts that create connections with students’ lives beyond the classroom.  For example, assisting students as text-users to interpret nutrition panels on products such as breakfast cereals scaffolds them as code-breakers and text-participants by providing them with background knowledge necessary to judge the validity of the claims being made on the rest of the packaging (One breakfast biscuit may well be ‘exciting’, ‘delicious’ and ‘rich in cereals’, but it is also one quarter sugar.).  Comparing newspaper articles/reports also illustrates the manner in which authors can seek to manipulate readers’ responses (e.g. Is state politics experiencing everyday ‘tensions’ and ‘rivalries’ or is it in fact a war-zone, with ‘forces mobilising’ and ‘battleground marginal seats’?).  This second activity further emphasises the need to assist students to become discerning readers and consumers, drawing on the four reader roles.

'Tomorrow When the War Began' & 'Fox'

'Tomorrow When the War Began' by John Marsden

I would really like to talk about the whole series, but I decided to start at the beginning with this book! Marsden creates a mini-world in such a way that the reader knows that the characters and the setting are Australian from the very first page. The way the characters communicate with each other includes colloquial Australian dialogue, such as '...I reckon', '...I'm keen' and '...the Landie'. The Tomorrow series contains exciting and adventurous books that would really appeal to a number of adolescents.



'Fox' by Margaret Wild (illustrations by Ron Brooks)

The first thing that appealed to me with this picture book was (surprise, surprise), the pictures! When I actually read the book after appreciating the artwork, I identified a number of different themes, such as difference (with the dog and the magpie), and intrusion (with the fox). The thing I liked most about this book is that the start of the book is not traditional, in that the story and the characters have not really been set up, it comes in during the middle of the action. There is also no clear resolution at the end of the book, which forces the reader to think about possible endings and conclusions. Also, this would be a great book for shared reading, as it provides the teacher with a number of possibilities for questions.

Week 8 Reading Log - Petrina

Both picture books I am focussing on in this entry would lend themselves very well to Shared and Guided Reading activities. 

The first is Shutting the Chooks In by Libby Gleeson and Ann James.  I really enjoyed the way that verb groups, and the degree of threat inferred via the illustrations, have been used to great effect to build suspense and then a sense of sanctuary.

A class would certainly enjoy the bright illustrations, vivid adjectives and sing-song nursery rhyme structure and rhythm found in Isabella’s Garden by Glenda Millard and Rebecca Cool. It could also provide an easy-to- follow template for students’ own compositions or be used for Reader’s Theatre.

Petrina's Sixth Reading Log Entry

I really enjoyed the novels included in my reading log this week. Kate Constable’s Crow Country has been highlighted in the recent CBCA Book Week awards.  It tells the story of a quest to understand and put right past injustice, while acknowledging contemporary injustice and prejudice. The ‘timeslip’, as in Somewhere Around the Corner, offers a powerful literary tool for portraying two eras and dominant perspectives. 

The Barrumbi Kids by Leonie Norrington also explores the complexity of cross-cultural experiences.  The semantics and syntax in the dialogue are quite divergent from Standard Australian English and contribute towards believable portrayals of characters.  The author has an ability to ‘draw’ vivid imagery:  ‘And it is just like that:  The river moist and moving, its breath lifting into the cold morning air – water breathing smoke (p.85)’.

Luke’s Way of Looking by Nadia Wheatley & Matt Ottley is a delightful story about the way creative individuals can see the world differently, and the empowerment that can flow from this perspective being acknowledged and fostered.  The basic narrative structure is followed closely, with exposition, complication, climax and resolution.  The source of conflict may be seen as Character (Luke) vs Society (as represented by Luke’s teacher, Mr Barraclough.  The conclusion is poignant.

Bilby, Bilby, Where do You Sleep? and Home, both by Narelle Oliver, both present factual information – in the first instance using rhyming text (which may be appropriate for ‘Readers’ Theatre’ for younger students) and peep-holes to add suspense and anticipation, and secondly as a structured narrative, from the Peregrine Falcon’s perspective, making use of verb groups to convey drama.  Both books include scientific terminology and seek to inform and educate the reader.

'An Ordinary Day' & 'Henry Hoey Hobson'

'An Ordinary Day' by Libby Gleeson (illustrations by Armin Greder)

This picture book uses a number of different narrative techniques. There are two pieces of text going on, the first is written in third person, the second by Jack, who is the main character. He makes little comments throughout the first few pages. Then the words stop and it is all illustrations. Colour is introduced into the pictures as Jack's imagination comes to life. The way Gleeson is able to portray the thoughts and imagination of a boy is really special.



'Henry Hoey Hobson' by Christine Bongers

Within the first 5 pages, this novel had me laughing out loud as I was introduced to Henry's awkward early teenage life. The narrative is in the first person, from Henry's point of view and Bongers sets up his character in such a way that you can really feel his embarrassment and his awkwardness. The story is based in suburban Australia and Bongers is able to develop the mini-world through Henry's environment and social life, for example, the time he spends at the local swimming pool. A very funny novel that took me back to those less than coordinated early teenage years.