This is where, as the cliche says, the rubber hits the road because dramatic play is nothing if it is not a productive teaching and learning strategy that sustains your professional motivation to meet classroom challenges. For this unit of work, I’m setting out to meet the needs of a group in Year 7 in my school who are struggling to cope with their lack of automaticity decoding, reading fluently and, as a consequence, lack the skills in reading comprehension as well. They have been identified through the ACER PAT test and are receiving focused attention in the ‘core literacy’ program that deal with improving every Year 7 to 9 students reading comprehension abilities.
Ironically, my choice is not give those students even more ‘interventionist’ type attention in my English class but to write a scheme of work which raises the status of phonological awareness across the whole of Year 7. Borrowing from my knowledge of theatre history and drama education, I’m designing Dr Seuss’s Reader’s Theatre Festival, based on the Level 7 sequence of lessons for multimodal text study, found on the ARC Victorian Lesson Plans.
Let’s start at the very beginning. Really?
I hear the controversy raging around me about set lesson plans taking away the teacher’s personal authority. Well, I welcome the creation of a bank of lessons by the VCAA as a form of ‘practising what it preaches’ through the ten high impact teaching strategies (HITS). Most notably, it directly highlights the productive use of ‘structured lessons’ and ‘worked examples’, and indirectly shows through the detailed work of each lesson plan the thoughtful incorporation of all.
I feel more confident, in fact, to dealing with the specific needs that I see within my school context because I have a point of reference of ensuring how my program of work meet my fundamental professional responsibility of enabling students meet mandated learning outcomes. So, allow me to show you how I adapted the set sequence, keeping in mind that I’m able to do so because the document is part of the ‘creative common’. Similarly, I am offering what I create back into the same space.
I’m a member of the Curriculum Writers Association Australia
I joined CWAA from its foundation in 2023 because I believe it to be an important forum in which I will have on-going discussions about how technologies, policies and the many other complex factors in education impact how I view myself as a curriculum writer. It’s a robust organisation that looks at the many overlapping issues between individual and public ownership and copyright. However, I’m clear about my values as a ‘public school teacher’, that my adaptations VLPs as a classroom teacher are free and in the public domain.
Begin with the end in mind
https://arc.educationapps.vic.gov.au/learning/resource/81297/e-l7s2-overviewLike looking at the index of an important reference book, I began reviewing the VLP sequence through the document entitled “Sequence Overview“. There I moved between reading the table setting out the sequence of 24 lessons and the list of Strands and Content Descriptors covered through completing the unit.
Initially, my response to using the Sequence Overview was to pedantically pick up on what I believe to be a misnomer of ‘Strand’ instead of sub-strand, as the strand is only identified through the VCAA code denoting LA, LE or LY for the Language, Literature and Literacy Strands. The list of titles in bold are, in fact, the sub-stands.
Furthermore, I noted the large number of content descriptors which far exceeded the two or three per unit which I’m use to working with in programs of work in my school written to align with Version 1 of the English Victorian Curriculum. However, I felt that making a judgement on the efficacy of the number of Substands and Content Descriptors might best be decided once I viewed how the curriculum writer used them to produce the Learning Intention and Success Criteria for the 24 lessons. So, at this stage, I decided to remain faithful with the logic of the sequence being offered.
Appreciating the similarities and spotting the differences
The major similarities I hope you noticed is my appreciation of the cadence of formative assessments, culminating with the summative assignment. This begins in an low-risk assessment in Lesson 1 and then builds more intensely in Lessons 8 and 17. From there, I stayed with the set up and execution of the summative assignment from Lessons 21 to 24. Note how I kept to this pattern in the highlighted yellow.
Furthermore, notice how I’m capitalising on the Lesson Plans’ setting up of a thorough exploration of how sounds and images resonate to create a multimodal text. This is the hub of a good structure which I believe can be enhance by giving students the opportunity to read the text aloud to a ‘real’ audience. Most deliciously, Dr Seuss’s own visual collateral of ‘give-away’ background settings , animations, music and sound effects provides students with a stimulating continuum on how the human voice sits in multimodal art forms, messaging their profound insights through ‘silly tongue-twisters’ and word play.
The key differences I make in my adaptation is to spend more time practising the oral presentations of the text before different audiences. Consequently, I pinpoint only one form of analytic writing, the self and peer reflections of the readings of the text aloud. A source of differentiation in the lessons will be for students to synthesise the sound and visual elements offered in the texts. As this lives in the detail of the program, I will make this evident in the individual lesson plans. The important feature to notice is how I preference content descriptors VC2E7LY01 – 07 with regards to interacting with others through texts and how word fluency is built into oral presentation of the text rather than writing an analytic expression of it.
Learning intention and success criteria show that words have power
When I say to students “we are learning to read to present a reader’s theatre presentation”, I am saying that through effort and practice we can create an event in which they share the text with early childhood students. Such a performer-audience relationship galvanises many related issues for working with a real audience, not the least understanding how to work with others to meet a common goal.
The courage to succeed is bound up in giving students status and choices as Year 7s to read, for instance, Fox in Socks to early childhood students in interesting ways. As the producer and director of a classroom ‘assessment event’, I’m fundamentally modelling for my students how relating to others is always about them experiencing how words have power! Sometimes you are able to muster up a great deal and carry the audience with you, but at other times (like a good sportsperson) you take pride in having done your best.
Explicitly teaching the articulation of vowels and consonants
Dr Seuss is famous for his intelligent use of ‘nonsense’ through absurd tongue-twisters and wordplay. In the light of this, it’s worth remembering that grammatical structures are located in the same part of the brain as mathematical problem-solving. So, moving slowly over the first three slides is crucial for setting up the meaning of the text:
Working with the open-vowel sound ‘O’
Socks Box Knox – Knox in box – Knox on Fox – Socks on Knox/ and Knox in socks/ Fox in socks on box on Knox
- What’s the meaning of physically having a ‘voice’?
- ‘Voice’ is produced when the outgoing air from the lungs causes the vibration of the vocal cords in the larynx or ‘voice box’.
- All vowel sounds are ‘voiced’.
- Not all consonants are ‘voiced’
- What’s the meaning of physically producing English speech sounds?
- English has 44 phonemes (sounds) and 26 graphemes (alphabetical letters)
- What distinguishes vowel and consonant sounds is based on how the sound is produced by the outgoing air from the lungs which is shaped by the speech organs
- vowel sounds do not impend
- The 44 phonemes are made up of: 12 single vowel sounds; 9 double vowel sounds (aka diphthongs); the rest are consonants that are grouped together according to the speech organs that produce the sound.
- The distinction between vowel and consonant sounds amounts to the fact that vowel sounds do not impede the outgoing air in any way.
- Thus, slides 1 to 3 carefully sets up a hypothesis through rhyming words that relate concepts of identity (Knox & Fox) and a clothing item (socks).
- English has 44 phonemes (sounds) and 26 graphemes (alphabetical letters)
- The reading challengingly plays’ with phonemes and graphemes: that ox & ocks have the same sound; that the use of capitals in Knox and Fox are proper nouns; and that the two characters are somehow linked by the ‘silly’ use of a box and the wearing of socks.
- There are inferences to pick up as well about who’s doing what to whom. The wily Fox seems to be directing the actions shown by the ever cheerful Fox. For instance, look at the three illustrations end up in a glum image of Knox sitting with the box and Fox above him in the third image.
- At this stage, as a ‘stage director’ I would be explicitly asking the ‘narrators’ to position for their early childhood audience the ‘who’ (Fox and Knox), ‘where’ (the Utopian story space) and ‘what’ ( tongue-twister contestations propelled by Fox).
Then, from repetition of ox and ocks sounds to icks and ch (k) together blends bl, cl and br, tr.
- Slide 4 shows the introduction of new characters. Seuss goes from using the open / rounded mouth formation of ‘o’ to the vowel sound of ‘i’ which is formed by spread of the lips. This is then further emphasised by the consonant formation of bi-labial ‘b’, the alveolar [tongue against riggly teeth ridge] formation of ‘l’ and back of mouth uvula plosive consonant ‘k’. Symphonically brilliant as the sound of ‘ocks’ continues in the lines for good measure too.
- Such dexterity of sound formation is built for being practised… mindful of the different mouth positions that are required to make them. In the ‘olden days’ we used mirrors to help children view their growing skill of articulation. These days, with the right protocols in place, a mobile phone will do the trick.
Are you starting to get the verbal dexterity needed?
- Slides 5 and 6 represent another lot of sounds that Dr Seuss gives the reader to play with: this time with the long vowel sounds of ‘oo’, ‘u’, ‘ew’ and ‘ee’. These are counteracted with the short vowel sound of ‘a’.
- Slide 7 moves back to short vowel sounds of ‘i’ and ‘e’ together with bi-labial sounds of ‘b’ and ‘m’
With this symphony of sound in play, fill in the form to download my adaptation of the 24 lessons for your consideration. It would be most helpful to get feedback,