Teach-Reading-and-Writing-Issue-22

www.teachwire.net | 23 BOOKS FOR SCHOO L S Loved this? Try these... v The Boy, The Troll, and The Chalk by Anne Booth, illustrated by David Litchfield v Everybody Has Feelings by Jon Burgerman v Alone! by Barry Fields v The Invisible by Trudy Hardwig, illustrated by Patrice Barton v The Red Tree by Shaun Tan bring. A great technique for grounding yourself if you are feeling lonely, angry, or sad is to take a walk outside and do some mindfulness exercises. Here are a few ideas you might like to try with your class or small groups: • Slow walking – This works best in just socks or bare feet! Take 10 to 15 slow steps outside, noticing the heel-to-toe movement. Focus on how the ground feels beneath your feet. Try walking over a variety of surfaces (grass, crunchy leaves, pebbles, smooth tarmac) to increase sensory feedback. • A five-senses scavenger hunt – Pause at various points on a nature walk and ask the children to name five things they can see, four things they can hear, three things they can feel, two things they can smell, and one thing they can taste (like fresh air or a snack). • Nature mandalas – Collect together natural items such as sticks, leaves, or stones and arrange them in circular mandalas on the ground. Pay close attention to the colours, shapes and patterns created, before leaving them for someone else to enjoy. FEELING DRAMATIC Drama is an effective way to get children thinking more deeply about emotions and to help them start making links between what they are feeling in their bodies and which emotion(s) they are experiencing. It will also help them become better at reading the body language of others. • Role play – You could provide the children with prompts of situations when someone is feeling lonely, or the groups could devise a scenario of their own. Ask the children to act out the situations then model kind and supportive responses. For example, a new pupil has started school and is alone at breaktime. What could the children say or do that would help? • Freeze frames – If you really want to get the children thinking carefully about their body language and facial expressions, freeze framing is the dramatic technique you need. They will need to create two freeze frames – one which is a still image of ‘loneliness’, which they will then transform into an image of ‘connection.’ It might be helpful to give the children mirrors to practise their facial expressions in before they begin, so that they see precisely what their features are doing. Jo Cummins is an experienced primary school teacher and English leader with a passion for children’s books and mental health awareness. As well as blogging about new children’s books and creating educational resources, she has been involved in long-listing and judging national books awards. Jo currently works for a specialist educational provision in Hampshire in a teaching and advisory role and volunteers with the Children’s Book Project. The children should create illustrated pages for their advice, inspired by the book’s illustrations. They could use drawings, doodles, or illustrations to illuminate their pages. You might want to create a longer book with further sections such as, ‘What loneliness feels like’, ‘Things that help’ or ‘Kind words for a friend’. This could be kept in a class reading corner or school library for pupils to access when they need to. about how all the different metaphors come together to create the same kind of feeling – even though we may all experience loneliness slightly differently, it is an emotion that most people will experience at various times. A guide for lonely times Hopefully, during earlier discussions, the children will already have shared times when they have felt lonely or when other people may feel lonely. They will be using these as starting points for a self-help guide, which will echo the hopeful supportive tone of the book. Start by revisiting the story. What does the author say that loneliness feels like? What helps the character feel better? Divide the board into two columns. Label the first, ‘What loneliness feels like’. Record the key ideas to refer to later, for example: shadows, grey, empty spaces, being left out . Label the second column, ‘What helps’. Add some of the ideas from the book (being with nature, reaching out to others, remembering happy times). Encourage the children to add ideas of their own too, for example: stroking my cat helps or looking at old photos . The next step is for the children to work in pairs or small groups to expand and reframe the ‘What helps’ list into advice for peers. For example, ‘Go for a walk outside and name three things you can hear’ or ‘Talk to a friend or teacher, even if it feels hard’. To extend this task further, challenge pupils to try and emulate the book’s style, so rather than ‘Talk to a friend’, they might write ‘Shadows shrink when you talk to a friend’. phrase shared? Can any of them extend the phrase by adding a simile onto the end? For example, ‘My loneliness is always by my side, like a cloud of fog that refuses to lift.’ After creating some new phrases as a group, the children should go on to write their own ones, personifying loneliness and creating a simile to add further description. This could be simplified by asking them just to come up with a simile – or extended, by asking pupils to add a reflective phrase on the end which mirrors the hopeful message conveyed at the end of the book. For example, ‘But when I see my friend smile, the fog begins to clear.’ These phrases can then all be combined into a class poem which you can read aloud together. Think