Picked up Wordle-ing from the Goldsmith creatives. Works in class where kids can see that moving words around is fine, fun and shape-shifting! Take this… which is better – this or (my – sheepish) original? (a no-brainer!):
Propagation
We lie like crisscrossing fruittrees
Limbs intermingling
Barks touching
rubbing
Sap rising
Grafting
together
We’re using 5,4,3,2,1 with hand raised as a method of gaining class attention. It works (or at least the classes are used to it) I sometimes add ‘I’m waiting’. S doesn’t use names, just boys/girls so does not pick people out. Waiting for attention is crucial. It didn’t work in my first week and the class went ballistic after the end of the lesson. Fortunately the HoD was on call and rode to the rescue…nice to be part of a good team.
A delicious, funny, touching love story of…well I won’t spoil it. Big issues of course without the kind of whodunnit adventure of Finding Violet Park.
Chris Kane (who is very Abel with his fists) is a violent monster (Frankenstein, Heathcliff) and is after his runaway partner and her son (by a previous partner). It is a terrifyingly gripping suspense novel with a beautifully crafted racism subplot. A local school is doing it as a Y7 class text! Way to go!
Found an airhole in the ice! Got lost in the AQA anthology, so much death and poetry COMIN’ ATCHA. My Last Duchess was incomprehensible to some until I rewrote it (poorly) as My Last Missus, with a man showing off the tattoo of his last missus.! I sought refuge with Apples and Snakes and asked them for inspiration. Their take on poetry is that it should come from the kids not AT THEM… Which is what happened with Roger McGough’s Words…Poems. None of the Y7 class filled the gaps with words and poems, but with all sorts of other stuff, trees, world, brother/sister-community etc. Kurt, BP, Mungo and Me proved a hit too when we asked the class to make up Jonesey rhymes and finish off what happened next stories.
Started Great Expectations this week. Used the Teacherstv idea of pre-reading tasks – looking for the longest sentence, and clues about how old the text was etc. Also used Neil Bartlett’s play text as a way-in to the novel. It is much more than just a way in! Classical Comics are bringing out a Graphic Novel in March and they have some superb artwork on their website already. The students loved that!
Also started Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It is a searingly cool novel, breathtakingly confident…reminds me a bit of Umberto Eco.
And Of Mice and Men. Doing that OldSkool, reading it in six chapters with students taking parts. Worked brilliantly.
Poetry – Bridge from prose text Buddy to Poetry. Idea storm – remembering important events/characters/feelings/ places. Making an ABC poem from the words. Turning Prose into Poetry – Two extracts from Buddy, cut and pasted into poetry shapes and new meanings.
“…Well who’s responsible? Mr Normington barked in his loudest voice. Buddy looked up and just happened to catch the teacher’s eye’s on him. It weren’t me, sir’ he said and then cursed himself for the mistake. ‘Wasn’t me, It wasn’t me’ Mr Normington sneered ‘ Well frankly I don’t care. Since you speak and look like a dustman, you can do a dustman’s job. Clear it up.’…”
AND,
“…For ten minutes he followed, watching her every move; the way her skirt swayed when she walked, how the collar of her jacket brushed the jagged line of her hair, how she rocked back on her heels while she was waiting to cross roads. He wished he could be invisible and watch her for days – at work, at her new home. He wanted to be inside her head – to know what she thought. How often did she think of him? Perhaps she was thinking of him now, as she waited at the traffic lights for a break in the stream of cars…”
AND – re-cut Roger McGough’s Streemin:
Im in the bottom streme
Which meens Im not bright
don’t like reading
cant hardly write
but all these divishns
arnt reely fair
look at the cemetery
no streemin there.
…AND Julie Ignatiou’s I am a Deemun:
Im a deemmun
I don’t know how to spel
I allwaze deay-dreem
and teechuz pik on mi
cos I dont kno how to reed
I dont kair wot pepel sai
I don’t nead to reed or ryte
I am not goeng to chooz it in the
therd years and
I dont need it in my Jobb-
Soh thair!
Whot do I kare!
FILLED in Roger McGough’s Words and Poems, and James Reeve’s The Sea
First week with the Y7s we made up A-Z poetry. Buddy (Nigel Hinton), football stars and local lists made up the crop that came in after the weekend. These were Buddy ideas that turned into a ‘found’ poem:
Attic
N told me a while back about a class discussion she led on Big Joe in Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful which made me look at it again and DK-S’s Crowstarver. Here’s Big Joe’s introduction in PP,
“…Mother told us when we were older that Big Joe had nearly died just a few days after he was born. Meningitis, they told her at the hospital. The doctor said Joe had brain damage, that he’d be no use to anyone, even if he lived. But Big Joe did live…As we were growing up, all we knew was that he was different. It didn’t matter to us that he couldn’t read or write at all, that he didn’t think like we did, like other people did. To us he was just Big Joe. He did frighten us sometimes. He seemed to drift off to live in a dream world of his own, often a world of a nightmares I thought because he could become very agitated and upset. But sooner or later he always came back to us and would be himself again, the Big Joe we all knew, the Big Joe who loved everything and everyone, especially animals and birds and flowers, totally trusting, always forgiving – even when he found out that hs sweets were rabbit droppings…”
In Dick King Smith’s Crowstarver there are problems with how some people react to Spider,
“…’Twas a bad day for the Sparrows when thik babbie were dumped on them. Why, if that had been a lamb as wasn’t right, born with a girt big head say and girt big tongue stickin’ out of its mouth – or got five legs or summat, well then Tom would have knocked ‘ee on the head, thees’t know. I bain’t saying he shoulda done to the babbie, but he ought to have let un fade away.’
‘Not for my money, Billy,’ said Ephraim the horseman. ‘ I reckon Tom done right’
‘And so do I’ said Percy Pound, and his voice was angry, ‘and I’m telling you all, here and now, you keep your mouths shut about that kid, especially you young uns. If I hear you’ve been poking fun so that Kath and Tom get to hear of it, you’ll get your cards, understand?’”
Neither Big Joe or Spider are allowed to go to school and they face many problems due to some people’s attitudes towards their learning difficulties throughout the stories. The books reflect the mixture of opinions towards disabled people, both accepting and negative, that are similar to those of today. They are in some ways about how the community learns to ‘include’ both boys, how not to disable them. Which sounds like the social model of disability to me.
In an editorial for Disability Now, Ian McRae writes,
“…At the risk of re-stating the totally bleedin’ obvious, it is society and the barriers it puts in our way that disable us, not our impairments. We are not, and can never be, “people with disabilities” because of the inescapable reality that we’re all disabled by the same discriminatory, unequal, disablist set of social barriers, attitudes and values. To call us something different is to further marginalise and ignore us…”
Radical children’s fiction then!!!
But do disable d people themselves have a voice in children’s books? The ’service user’ movement aims to empower people who access government services (Health, Social Care etc) to design and control those services rather than simply ‘receive’ them. There’s a brilliant book by the ‘user-controlled’ organisation – People First Lambeth called ‘We are not stupid’ available for download at http://www.shapingourlives.org.uk/ourpubs.html which is written by people with learning difficulties about their lives, how they are and how they would like them to be.
Anyone know of examples of disabled people in kids’/teenage fiction, from their own perspective?
p.s. There’s a brilliant teaching pack from Theatre Alibi on Crowstarver – http://www.crowstarver.com/educationpack.htm
Ian McRae’s editorial is at http://www.disabilitynow.org.uk/bad-language?searchterm=bad+lang
