Alongside your usual suspects of Reading and Writing in the English curriculum, there’s a third partner in crime. Actually, call them partners. There’s two of them. Speaking and Listening. They’re grouped together as one third of the English curriculum we have to report on to the parents in our twice yearly reports. Can your kid talk and can your kid listen.

Usually I’m tempted to respond to this one with one sentence.

‘Yes, he can talk. No, he won’t listen.‘

But I’d probably get in trouble for that, eh?

Anyway, as we’re writing the kids’ mid year reports at the moment, our 3/4 Unit set all our kids a homework task this week. A one minute prepared talk on their favourite place. This may prove a useful post for anyone searching on ideas for assessment tasks for Speaking and Listening at any stage. The topic of course could be altered to fit the required topics, but the way we structured the assessment may be of interest all the same.

In our grade we held them each afternoon as the kids brought them in. On Friday we did everyone who was left, and if they hadn’t prepared anything they sat up the front and rabbitted on about whatever came into their head.

Kids can be really good at that, eh?

I should really give credit where it’s due though. Just about all of them did a top little job of their talks. Only about a fifth of them read from notes, and one or two of those only used them as cues. The rest rattled it all off from within their heads and generally gave a good account of themselves. The shyest kid in the grade actually got up to do his first.

He didn’t really want to, but he was the only kid on Tuesday who was ready. He then spent the rest of the week kicking back knowing he didn’t have to do it again!

Here’s how we ran these Speaking and Listening assessment pieces. The kids would be ranked either ‘Just Satisfactory‘, ‘Good‘ or ‘Excellent‘ on three categories, depending on what particular traits they showed in their speech. The three categories were ‘Presentation‘, ‘Content‘ and ‘Audience‘.

Presentation and Content were pretty straight forward. If they read straight off their notes, they were just satisfactory - if they did it all from memory then they landed in Excellent. If their voice was quiet and mumbled, not so good, if they could go toe to toe in a conversation with the Queen, excellent. If their information was short, quick and pointless, duds - if it was entertaining and detailed, great job. And so on.

Audience was a little tricker. That came to answering questions from the grade as well as how attentive they were. If you were early in the list to present on an afternoon, the audience was better behaved. If you were the eighth person, the audience was getting ratty. I had to go easier on the later kids, eh?

Overall though it was a great success. I’ve told the kids plenty of times that the only thing holding us right back is the fact that they all love to talk, even and especially when they’re really not supposed to. That in mind though, it’s no real surprise at all that they generally all did really well with an assessment piece that was, essentially, talking.

It was quite amusing listening, too. We heard about your usual suspects for favourite places such as Lakes Entrance, Queensland, Merimbula and various holiday places. But we also heard about such more private and intimate places like ‘My Bedroom’, ‘Nan’s Kitchen’ and ‘My mate’s house ‘cos it’s got this wicked as dirt pile bike jump in the front yard! WICKED SICK, EH?’

Honestly, they’re a bunch of little showmen, the whole lot of them!

Today was the last day in the classroom this week. Tomorrow is our House Sports day, and Friday is ANZAC Day itself, so today was the final chance I had to pass on a few of the stories about Gallipoli to the kids and try to get across at least some of the tragedy, humour and sheer grit and nobility of those ‘first’ ANZACs in 1915. I suppose I might as well start at the beginning.

It was yesterday we sat down as a group and I told them the story of Lone Pine. A trench-covered stretch of land who’s only notable feature was a lonesome pine tree growing on top of a small hill. It was one of several major offensives the Allies attempted in early August, 1915 to break the stalemate, and we only had a short amount of time to bring it to the kids’ attention yesterday. This morning we made a little more time to go into a little more detail. Keep in mind these kids are eight to ten year olds, but I only pulled punches when I really felt I had to.

Trench warfare is the first thing that started to show them that the life of a soldier is not such an adventure after all. One bullet down the spout and when it’s fired, you have to stand and reload. They quickly worked out that no Turk in his right mind was going to stand politely by while you reloaded your rifle to shoot him down again. The answer was the bayonet, that footlong piece of steel attached to the end of your rifle. To stab into the next poor bloke you ran up against. As expected, a few of them, mostly boys, let’s be honest, thought that sounded pretty cool. Until I pulled out a 40cm ruler and told them that was about the size of the blade being stabbed into your gut. Not such the glorious, clean adventure it was made out to be, is it?

They finished beginning to wonder what the whole point of battles like these were when we finished talking about Lone Pine and how the Australians captured the position and held it for six days with 2300 casualties. But their ears pricked up when I spoke more about the tree itself.

After the battle, seeds from the Lonesome Pine were taken by a digger. I don’t know his name, and I don’t know if many do, but he eventually brought the seeds back to Australian when he returned. They were planted, I believe but could be mistaken, at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, where they have since grown into another pine, the son of the Lone Pine, if you will. The kids recognised the family ‘tree’, as it were, and thought that was a fitting way to remember the battle, even though they thought it a waste of life for no real outcome. But the story didn’t end there. Seeds from that tree were then taken, a few years ago, and planted. From those grew hundreds of new, young pines, grandchildren of the Lonesome Pine. One of them ended up in a very special place.

‘Where did that one go?’ they asked eagerly, interest rising by the moment.

‘It’s planted in the garden outside the office.’

Yes, like all primary schools were supposed to receive, we have a small pine tree growing in our school yard which can trace its roots, as it were, back to that single Lonesome Pine that bore witness to that battle all those years ago. The kids quickly agreed it was clearly the most important tree in the school.

That afternoon, I finished the story, in a way. The following day was the battle of the Nek, and the 600 Lighthorse who were to capture it. The kids agreed that bombarding the position with ship artillery to scare the Turks off was a clever way of starting things off, so the Lighthorse could run across No Man’s Land with their bayonet charge and take the trench as easily as possible. They were devastated to learn that one of the commanders’ watches was seven minutes slow, which gave the Turks time to man their machine guns again.

When they learned that three waves of soldiers were sent over into a rain of machine gun fire before the attack was eventually called off they were all but silent.

But only for a moment before they all voiced their opinions over a futile and pointless attack. 300 dead in such a short time and in an area the size of two tennis courts. When they realised our school has only 370 odd kids, the number soon became even more powerful.

It was then that I sat them down to listen to ‘And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’.

After that none of them left that afternoon thinking war was an adventure for the boys. It’s not a great adventure if your legs get blown off.

Hopefully it will send a few more of them to the parade on Friday.

Related posts: And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Two Little Boys,

Technorati Tags: ANZAC Day, Lone Pine, The Nek, Gallipoli

Having a webcomic of my own, drawing characters and inventing little adventures involving them is a nice little hobby of mine. Being a teacher, I’m required to get the kids writing short stories and things as well. More than that, I’m supposed to give the kids the understandings of how to write these short stories and various written texts they’ll undertake. Somehow, hopefully, for the best outcomes all ’round, I’d like to make these lessons entertaining and interesting for the kids as well as something they’ll learn and remember.

Another site on the web featuring webcomics and classrooms has a similar sort of lesson set out. Suitably named Comics in the Classroom, it has a few other ideas as well. While their lesson plan is nice and proper and written out in the appropriate way and gives you the goals, aims and outcomes all nicely stated… I tend not to work that way. I didn’t write this one up nice of professionally. I didn’t spend two weeks or so planning the lesson. I just felt the kids needed to know how to use quotation marks properly (it’s actually part of the 3/4 curriculum, as we found upon a closer reading!) and to me, it seemed colouring in a comic strip that their teacher actually drew would have been much more entertaining for the kids.

Yes, okay. It was a little bit of self satisfaction for me too, but overall my intentions were noble…

So I’ve been combining the two, and the latest successes are here for anyone who wishes to share them. Or, possibly, is looking for a way to teach those kids how to use quotation marks correctly. So I give to you the School Spirit Quotation Mark Lesson Plan! Featuring the characters from the School Spirit webcomic, and the work of this year’s grade threes and fours.

Here is a selection of four panels I chose from my collection of School Spirit bits and pieces. I blew these up to a size where two would fit onto an A3 page. Then, I cut them up. Put them up on the board in a random order, and the kids were set the task as a group to decide which order they would need to be in for the story to make sense. This is a good little sequencing activity too. In this case, they realised that Cody (the feller with the hat) had to reach up to the bars before he could get his legs up, and had to have his legs up before he could hang from them. Later, on a closer look, they also realised they were correct to have them in that order, as his hat falls off during the story, and this sequence allowed for that. So far, all good, and the kids are getting into their heads that stories need to follow a set sequence.

Next, we gave Casper and Cody (the two boys) words for them to say in each panel, and surrounded these with speech bubbles, noting that these allow us to see what each person is saying. All well and good, and we had some fun deciding what was happening in the story and then putting the words in their mouths, so to speak. Here came the fun bit for the kids.

‘Okay, guys, here’s a small version of the strip for you. Off to your seats and write your own words for the boys to say! Don’t forget your speech bubbles, okay? When you’ve written it all out, have fun and colour it in! Make it look rip-snorter because by the end of the week they’ll be hanging on the wall.’

Off they went, and there was the first morning filled with happy, enjoyable yet hopefully meaningful education!

Next day, we brought our comic strips back out to our tables and gathered on the floor in front of our large version from the day before. Here the kids were introduced to quotation marks, and learned that they are put either side of the sentence a character in a story says. That was easy. We wrote the first piece of dialogue out on the board and put talking marks either side. What’s missing?

Yep, we don’t know who’s saying the words. After a quick brainstorm of interesting ways we could say ’said’, we added ’said Casper’ at the end. What’s missing now?

Yep, the rest of the talking. Where do we write that? At the end of the first one? No, we leave a line so we can tell someone else is saying something. Yes, just like starting a new paragraph. Got that? Great. Off we went and together rewrote the speech bubbles out in about eight lines of dialogue, complete with quotation marks and ’said Casper or Cody, etc’ tacked on the end. Missing anything now?

No? Actually, kids, we are. Just inside the last quotation mark, just before we tell the reader who’s saying the words, we have to include a comma, or a question mark or an exclamation mark if your speech bubble has one. Why? Just so we can remember to have a small pause as we’re reading, and because, well, look in another book and you’ll see that’s just the way we write it. Okay? Good.

Yep, they seemed to get all that pretty well. Here came the kicker. ‘Okay, kids. Here’s some practice writing paper, off you go and write out your speech bubbles just like we did here! Once it’s all editted and checked, you can write it out neatly on some display paper and put it with your comic up on the wall. Sound good? Great. Hit the tables!’

Off they went, and bugger me, it worked! To the right are two examples of finished pieces taken from the wall that afternoon. About half of the kids completed the entire activity. The rest will use time next week to finish them off. The great news, though, was that each kid found they could follow the steps and included the quotation marks, wrote who was saying each line, and even remembered the comma on most occasions.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, eh? The next step is giving them a writing activity in the next week or so where they have to put this into practice. Then we’ll see if it’s still swimming around in their heads!

Tags: writing, lesson plans, comics, teaching