Chapter 5 Creatively engaging readers in the later primary years

TALK AND PLAYFUL ENGAGEMENT

Through talking about texts, learners come to articulate and share their thoughts, feelings and ideas, and listen to those of others. Talking about and questioning a text enables children to share their understanding and puzzlements. Hearing the ideas of others may deepen their understanding and offer new insights since social inquiry promotes metacognition and reflection. Creative teachers encourage curiosity and ownership of the learning process, enabling focused conversation to enrich comprehension and the development of empathy. As Maybin (2013:65) argues ‘imagination and creativity, emotional and moral engagement and humour and fun are all intrinsically important aspects of children’s responses to fictional texts’. Through book discussion circles, book groups, book buzz sessions, book swaps, book recommendation slots, X factor style book awards, guided reading and so on, creative teachers of reading develop an ethos where response to texts is taken as the norm in the classroom. They encourage and support talk by asking open-ended, higher order questions and spend considerable time encouraging children to ask these too. Their questions and enquiries, their interests and confusions can lead to discussions around texts, supported by their teachers who help them make connections both to their lives and to the text. The ‘Tell me’ approach (Chambers 1993) and the use of literature circles offer examples of how such discussions can be organised and guided. See Chapter 8 for more details.

Spending time on a powerful, affecting book can enhance the quality of the talk as discussion becomes more informed and complex over time. If this is picture fiction, it can be revisited and new insights discovered. Highly potent examples which trigger discussion include The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman, Black Dog by Pinfold, and Belonging and Mirror by Jennie Baker, (both of these Baker texts have no words, but prompt curiosity and conversation). Gathering collections of books which explore particular themes enables contrast to be made and diversity to be recognized. For example when sensitively reading and discussing books which explore bereavement and loss, then the novels A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and My Sister lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher or the picture texts The Scar by Claire Moundlic and The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers offer rich material for reflection.
Focusing on a single novel too can also enable teachers to teach reading skills in context. A creative teacher used the class novel, King of the Cloud Forest by Michael Morpurgo with 10–11-year-olds over several weeks to encourage aesthetic responses and talk and teach comprehension skills in context. The result was a high level of motivation, understanding and engagement. The text is full of action, emotion and dilemmas and offered plenty of opportunities for discussion, drama, encouraging personal and critical responses, and building understanding through creative activities to develop empathy, inference and deduction. It linked to the theme of mountains being studied elsewhere in the curriculum. The class were used to working on a class novel over a period of weeks with their teacher reading aloud, alongside reading in independent and guided contexts. Reading journals, in which they recorded comments, questions and drawings were also kept (see Chapter 8 for more details).
Modelled by the teacher, the class developed an ethos of discussion and listened supportively to others ideas during extensive book talk. They were encouraged to reflect both on their growing understanding of the story and on how this had happened. Encouraging the children to be metacognitive – to think about how they had learnt as well as what they had learnt – is part of the process of creating reflective readers (Kelley and Clausen-Grace, 2007).
To foster close attention to the text and deduction, and to teach visualisation as a skill that can enhance understanding, the children made a map of the compound after reading the first chapter. This involved careful rereading and deduction and helped children ‘see’ the setting as well as read about it, enabling their teacher to assess their comprehension of the story so far and enabling them to make connections to map making /scale plans in geography and mathematics. Throughout they noticed how the descriptions of the mountain environment and its weather gave richness to their studies in geography.
A compare and contrast activity was used to illuminate the relationship between the main character and his best friend. Children noted that over time the main character began to question what his father told him. This led to drama and an intense debate about tolerance, with the class drawing on their own lives for examples. The respectful ethos being developed, where talk and risk taking were encouraged, meant that one child felt able to reveal that his parents had divorced because of different beliefs. This aspect of the story touched on a deeply personal experience and enabled the child to examine it.
Freeze-frames, drama and hot-seating were used throughout to consider cause and effect and develop empathy, and the boy’s decision whether or not to leave was explored in a conscience alley. Critical and alternative viewpoints were encouraged. After the drama activities children sometimes completed a ‘think, feel, say’ grid from a chosen character’s perspective.
The class also reflected on the characters’ changing emotions. Key points were noted on a board using post-it notes and groups arranged these on an emotions chart which triggered further discussion. Finally, emotions graphs were made which involved identifying effective vocabulary in this purposeful, contextualised context (see Figure 5.1). The teacher felt that the quality and amount of talk about the text increased ‘phenomenally’ over this unit of work and the children’s comprehension improved as they explored the text orally, visually, aurally and kinaesthetically. This active, creative and collaborative approach had an impact on the readers’ enthusiasm and enjoyment of the text and several of them went on to buy their own copy.

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[caption]■ Figure 5.1 An emotions graph to reflect Ashley’s journey