Lucky Undies: YEAR 1 - English - Elaborate
Little J feels lucky when he wears a new pair of yellow undies. After Old Dog destroys them, he loses his confidence. Big Cuz saves the day with the remnants of the undies made into a sweat band, and Little J finds confidence to play the basketball game and win the day.
Elaborate - Create short imaginative and informative texts that show emerging use of appropriate text structure, sentence-level grammar, word choice, spelling, punctuation and appropriate multimodal elements, for example illustrations and diagrams
Theme - CHARACTER
After viewing Little J & Big Cuz, episode 1, ‘Lucky Undies’, engage students with the following activities to support their understanding of Little J’s sense of luck and superstition.
‘Lucky Undies’ is essentially about overcoming the odds and believing in yourself. It is a common human story that has engaged the imagination of all ages. The story waxes and wanes through the events, and emotions are exaggerated to build suspense and relief at the anticipated outcome.
Task
Invite students to create a new version of Episode 1 ‘Lucky Undies’ for the Little J & Big Cuz series. They are to write (or retell) a short story or treatise where they are one of the characters in the episode and saw what happened. They are to report or retell the events of the episode from their own perspective. This retelling could be resourced and used as a voice over for the storyboard.
To assist students with the development, list the three essential story elements that all stories must include:
- Plot - what events happen in the story
- Character - who is involved in the action
- Setting - where does the action take place
Explain to students that the story must have:
- an Introduction
- a Middle
- a Conclusion
Once the story is developed, have students draw themselves as the new character who is watching everything. Print out a frame from the animated episode and insert the image of the ‘new character’ within the scene. Scan, upload and share with others. Or, use Storyboard Generator_ACMI (or an equivalent) to storyboard 3–6 frames where the new character has an impact on the story. Other suggested resources: