Old Monster Dog:YEAR 2-English-Engage2

Little J is initially scared to approach the ‘monster’ in the back yard. Encouraged to face his fears, he vows to catch the frilly-necked monster and sets about building a monster trap with the help of Levi.

Engage - Understand that spoken, visual and written forms of language are different modes of communication with different features and their use varies according to the audience, purpose, context and cultural background

Theme - HEROES & HEROINES

As a class, view the following video clip/s and/or read a selection of stories where the lead character is considered a ‘hero or heroine’. Applying the criteria that the class has agreed upon to define a ‘hero or heroine’, ask students to identify the heroes and heroines in these texts and what were their acts of bravery. Ask students to discuss each story and be ready to retell it to the class. Suggested stories could include:

Ask students to create their own ‘hero or heroine’ character. Discuss the type of person this character would be, the costume this character would wear and what each part of the costume symbolises, what powers the character has, etc.

Students can use this character as their Avatar and create a story to tell the class. The story can be oral, written or multimedia.

For multimedia storytelling, you will need to introduce your students to an animation app. There is free downloadable multimedia software available to every school, via the relevant state and territory departments of education or the Catholic and Independent schools’ sectors. Alternatively, your students could use any of the following resources:

  • Make a comic strip!, Creaza Cartoonist - Creaza is a cartoon creation website that allows kids to make their own online cartoons and mini-movies, with sound. They can use pre-drawn characters and backgrounds, or draw their own characters directly into a panel.
  • Toontastic - Toontastic allows you to create your own characters as well as being able to choose from a wide variety of existing characters.

An alternative approach to storytelling is to draw the character on cardboard, colour it in and cut it out. Students can make puppets of the characters using the traditional techniques of shadow puppets:

Suggested resources:

Once completed, the students can use the projector, lamp or torch as the light source to produce the shadows across the wall. An empty box can be used as the puppet theatre.

Divide the class into small groups and each group can produce their own shadow puppet hero or heroine story. For example: