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.

Engage - Identify visual representations of characters’ actions, reactions, speech and thought processes in narratives, and consider how these images add to or contradict or multiply the meaning of accompanying words.

Theme - NARRATIVE

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.

Visualisation

Have students lay on floor of the classroom with their eyes closed. Darken the room. Play the title music of Little J & Big Cuz (available on the Little J & Big Cuz website). Suggested teacher resources:

• Explicitly teaching listening strategies and visualization techniques to Prep students can improve comprehension and oral retelling of text
• Visualising

Ask students to concentrate on the style, tempo and mood of the music. Ask students to suggest:

• What the music says about the TV series?
• Who may be the main audience of the series?
• Where the series may be set?
• What culture does the series represent?
• Repeat this experience with a selection of title music of other children’s programs, e.g. Welcome to Wapos Bay trailer, Hoopla Doopla Trailer, and My Place Trailer.

As a class, view Episode 1 ‘Lucky Undies’, without the sound. Repeat the soundless episode and stop at different intervals and ask students to describe and interpret 

what is happening. Play the episode with both sound and vision and see how different the prediction of the story was to the actual narrative of the episode.

Divide the episode into 4 x 3-minute segments. Divide the class into four groups and allocate one segment of the episode to each group. Ask each group to develop an alternative script for their segment. Once determined and practised, have each group perform their alternative script for the other groups, in the order of the episode. Question the groups about why they changed the script and what their script tells the audience about the characters in the episode.