In my pupils’ dreams I am a mutant robot who chases them.
After 12 years in teaching, yesterday was a first for me. Three children read their writing aloud to the class and each one moved me to tears. Now I’ve cried before: emotional assemblies, fantastic examples of progress through perseverance, hearing about the early life experiences of the children (not to mention that class I had as an NQT who brought on tears more bitter in taste) but this was different: it was the realisation that these 10 and 11 year olds were real authors, who have the power to inspire emotions in their readers.
I have to say I am immensely proud of the children, of my planning team, who came up with most of the ideas, and with myself for not making a mess of the delivery of those plans.
So this article is a description and reflection on this unit of learning, what made it successful, what could be improved and how the conditions for its creation could be recreated. Some of my colleagues have expressed concerns about how practical it is to teach from a novel, so hopefully there are some simple takeaways here to help anyone planning from the starting point of a novel.
The unit itself developed quite organically from an initial idea around the book The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan. We chose the book after reading Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered because we wanted a text which introduced a complex narrative form. And, since we were studying South America, this book’s use of magical realism to tell the story of Pablo Neruda’s childhood seemed perfect.
The first few weeks were dedicated to explicit instruction of vocabulary and a variety of strategies which might come under Pie Corbett’s umbrella term ‘reading as readers’: preparing passages for reading with expression, ‘control the game’, close reading, and oral and written responses to reading.
We have realised that when it comes to explicit vocabulary teaching three words is an ideal number. The inspiration for this step came from ‘Bringing Words to Life, Second Edition: Robust Vocabulary Instruction’ by Isabel Beck and Margaret Keown. In this book, the authors suggest a maximum of six words for effective instruction but I prefer fewer (3 or 4) as this allows for less time to be spent on this section of the learning and more opportunities to engage with the reading. The children enjoy encountering the words they have been rehearsing in a ‘real’ text and benefit from advancing the story; it takes a lot of reading to get through a novel and you need to read at least some during each lesson. If you haven’t read the book above, or at least the summary in Reading Reconsidered, then really you should – and while you’re at it follow @Bedr0ckLearning on Twitter for free resources.
However for an extremely simplified overview:
-
Pick phase two words (advanced words which have high utility across various domains – as opposed to technical vocabulary – phase 3 – or words used widely in spoken language – phase 1)
-
Using detailed and child friendly explanations, tell children the meaning, don’t ask (you want the children to be thinking about correct usage and meaning not inventing plausible synonyms).
-
Use creative and engaging activities which encourage children to play with the word use (e.g. finding synonyms and antonyms, inventing sentences, word matching, using images, cloze procedure, oral games etc.)
Here is a simple vocabulary matching activity, which we backed up with lots of oral practice. We spent some time as a planning team creating child-friendly explanations and, though I wouldn’t normally print them out for children, it was a useful activity for us teachers.
We also spent some time close reading the text and spent some time modelling text marking. I often shared my copy with my text marks, trying to be as explicit as possible with the text marking process. You can see an example here.
This was the first time we had introduced text marking to the pupils in this way and next year I would like to investigate how to codify text marking a little more and also make sure we plan wider opportunities to practice this important skill. This year our main success criteria for text marking was ‘don’t underline if you don’t have anything to say about it’ (See Reading Reconsidered by Doug Lemov).
The Dreamer is a masterful piece of work, full of carefully chosen vocabulary and delicate yet precise narrative devices. The more we read, the more we fell in love with it. Many of the ‘Phase Two’ words (see Beck and Keown) repeat throughout the book allowing children to recall previously learnt vocabulary. Generally the level of challenge on offer was ideal for the pupils: even the best readers were stretched somewhat.
After one read, we were slightly concerned whether The Dreamer would engage the children but we couldn’t have been more wrong. On finishing the final page there was a chorus of, “Owww!” And, “That was the best book… EVER!”
My main tip for securing pupil engagement over the course of a novel is to spend longer analysing the key elements at the start of the story: character, setting etc. Then, as the plot develops, gradually increase the amount of reading and reduce the number of interruptions. Helping children understand the context at the start is crucial but later, like all of us, they will want to finish the book. And whereas at the start you might look at more factual or thematic issues (e.g. let’s look at the relationships between the characters), later interruptions to the story line should be more reverential in tone (e.g. I have to stop you there: can you see what the author has done with her word choices! Isn’t that such a careful and thoughtful use of language?) This will pay back dividends later when you are writing. I am currently reading Tom Sherrington’s The Learning Rainforest and he explains more clearly than I can, how this passion for the text influences pupils.
We then moved into the writing phase. Loosely following the imitate, innovate, independent application model described by Pie Corbett, we decided to write a whole class Magical Realist Biography so we reread sections of Pam Munoz Ryan’s book with a more authorial eye allowing pupils to ‘copy and paste’ her style before taking more creative control.
In art we were studying Frida Kahlo and one of my colleagues noted how many crossover themes there were between her life and those explored in The Dreamer: family, identity, independence, illness, the jungle, indigenous rights, machismo, magical realism etc. (the children came up with even more ideas). Eventually we put dos y dos together and began to write Magical Realist Biographies of Frida’s life.
Using the fantastically illustrated book Frida Kahlo by Isabel Sanchez Vegara in the Little People Big Dreams collection we planned an outline together. (I also employed one of my favourite ‘hacks’ for enhancing subject knowledge by listening to Radio 4’s In Our Time which has an episode dedicated to Frida).
We made a deliberate decision to pitch this writing as high as possible. We had many classroom discussions around the decisions we might make as authors: using symbolism, foreshadowing, Chekhov’s gun, making sure our imagery was consistent, how to control pace and how to elicit emotional responses in our readers. Much credit should go to the year 5 team for sending us such grammatically literate writers, but we had also been drilling the children all year on the non-negotiables: understanding of the subject and the verb, which leads to an understanding of main and subordinate clauses; all the punctuation knowledge and sound spelling strategies. This frees the children up to devote working memory to higher order thinking (e.g. how can I use punctuation to create the effect that time is moving very quickly?)
Using various levels of support; such as Guided Writing, Slow Writing and after reading exemplars; we wrote each chapter against success criteria (the children demanded that each chapter be themed around a colour and written on coloured paper!) This is at a time in the year when many year 6s have abandoned success criteria altogether, fearing the lack of ‘independent’ work. But two points are important here: firstly you have to teach children how to write before they can achieve and secondly there is much ‘independent application’ that can be found in children’s work even after something as closely controlled as slow writing (see David Didau or The Literacy Shed’s DADWAIVERS). For example if you modelled semi-colons but the children used dashes for parentheses then this demonstrates that the child can independently use parentheses.
For anyone who has read The Dreamer, you can see how this young writer has adopted elements of Pam Munoz Ryan’s style.
The writing they produced was of a high standard but we now needed the children to independently produce an extended piece of magical realist writing. So we asked them to think about their own dreams. What would they like to be when they were older? How would they get there? Each child broke down the journey and planned it out. Many picked up on the idea that the challenges you face in life and how you overcome them are the most interesting story to tell.
Being asked to write a fictional biography about yourself but in the third person and from the perspective of the future so in the past tense is a challenge. However, the children seemed freed by the writing. Maybe the fact they could change details at will allowed them to detach. Maybe the third person narrative perspective helped too. For some the writing felt like therapy and they told utterly compelling stories about real tragedy: from the death of a beloved pet to divorce to losing a parent. Each time the brief to write magical realism, gave the stories a poetic freedom and the sense of disorientation was shared between protagonist and reader.
One child, inspired by the interweaving of poem and narrative in The Dreamer, wrote the following words, which I have typed to preserve their anonymity:
[The arguing] happened every time Father came for three years. Then, something happened. No-one could quite put a finger on it. Or at least in front of the children. Father stopped contacting them. He never came. They had no idea where he was or what he was doing.
A small, ever moving, ever growing, ever shrinking lifeform slowly orbited a larger ever moving, ever growing, ever shrinking lifeform. Slowly the invisible bond between them broke. The first lifeform spiralled out of control. Ever moving, ever growing, ever shrinking, ever changing.
The fact that they wrote these words knowing I would read them gave me a huge sense of privilege and I hope, once they are published (alongside their beautiful Frida Kahlo style self portraits) they will be an item to cherish for many years to come.
We could improve: we only really explicitly taught vocabulary at the reading phase which means they had four weeks without. I would like to reflect on how well we taught the ‘writing for reading’ lessons too. However overall we feel it was highly successful.
It will certainly be a hard unit to follow. Our next project: using the musical West Side Story as our ‘text’. The key to successful planning, I am learning, is firstly to turn off your internal filter; no matter how much you think, ‘no that won’t work’ or ‘that’s too ambitious’ try to work through the idea until you are all agreed that it will work or to shelve it for now. And secondly, base the learning journey on some well grounded and solidly understood pedagogic principles and, when planning, focus as much of the conversation on the ‘why’ as you can rather than simply discussing the ‘how’.
If you would like more information, or to look at our plans or resources, just DM me: Mr S (@nosnomolas) or look at this link here
Diary of a Change Junky 