- Details
- Written by Anni Savisaari
- Parent Category: Finnish
- Category: Finnish 12-15
- Created: 25 January 2011
Curricular Aims: to practise writing a story from a different point of view and to consider different types of narrators
( first person narrator, third person narrator).
Thinking Aims: Limiting the framework of the story – the wolf must survive and
his purpose in telling the story is to teach others right from wrong through his experiences.
Encouraging the pupils to find the important parameters to the story which can’t be changed.
The question is, what would the wolf say?
- I divided the pupils into groups of three or four.
- Each group had to think about which features of the Red Riding Hood story are important from the wolf’s point of view, eg location, plot… They wrote down their thoughts as a list.
- On the basis of their lists we made a chart together on the blackboard (see below)
- We thought up an ending where the wolf would survive in order to tell his story.
- The wolf’s story had to be a moral tale – he was a reformed wolf.
in the forest The wolf and Red Riding Hood meet.
RED RIDING HOOD The wolf finds out where granny lives.
from the wolf’s point
of view. A moral tale the short cut The wolf takes a short cut to granny’s.
at granny’s house The wolf eats granny.
The wolf dresses up as granny.
Red Riding Hood arrives.
The wolf eats Red Riding Hood.
A hunter comes and saves Red Riding Hood
by cutting the wolf open.
Granny and Red Riding Hood are saved.
The wolf survives.
After this they wrote their own stories from the wolf’s point of view, as a first person narration.
It was amazing how much they wrote compared to what they usually do (some boys who’re not keen on
writing ended up writing five or six pages!) and pupils who usually spend a long time thinking
about where to start got down to work immediately. Their stories were very interesting and funny to read.
I don't know if this is the thinking method exactly, but it definitely helped them and I’d like to know
how I could develop it and help them to improve their writing more and be able to think about it better themselves.
Comments
I am glad to hear that your pupils were happy to do the task. Motivation is always important.
The next step would be to get the pupils to evaluate their works and see both the strong points and the places to be improved on.
A possible step in that direction would be to invite the pupils to make the algorithm for writing a point of view task (eg how could they teach a computer to do that or any other way of contextualising it that will be attractive for your pupils).
When they are done with it, your could ask them to exchange their algorithms and see if they'd work with the writings they'd done. This should both help them see the drawbacks of writings and the algorithms.
Do you think it might work with your learners?