50 Great Ways To Teach Texts

How do you engage students with a text? How do you teach narrative structure, character comparisons, themes and symbols in an interesting and deep way? We have spent the past two years compiling highly effective and engaging strategies to teach texts. Some are very simple such as these:

Character Comparisons:

1. Divide students into pairs
2. Get each pair to write down all the character names in a text on individual post-it-notes
3. Students must now divide the characters into 3 groups according to their own rule
4. They must record the groups and give a reason for the grouping.
5. Students must now re-group the characters (repeat this step for as many times as your students can do it).

Some activities utilise handouts such as the ones below:

These are just a sample of the comprehensive range of activities that will help you teach all aspects of a text at Years 7-12. You can now purchase the guide as a digital download in PDF format for AUS: $39.95. Buy and download by clicking the button:

Short Films / Big Ideas - Halloween Edition

It's not Halloween for a while (it's at the end of October), but we wanted to do our Halloween edition of our Short Films / Big Ideas blog now to give you time to get organised to run a mini (or full) unit on horror. Horror is a terrifically engaging unit to do with Years 7-9 students. However, often we can't watch films in our classrooms that students find scary. At home, they watch films like 'Saw' or 'Fright Night' or 'Scream' - all of which have an MA rating and are unsuitable for classroom viewing. Fortunately, there is a range of scary short films out there which can provide a fright to our students without needing to use gratuitous blood and gore to do so.

Below is a list of our favourite short horror films which you can watch in your 7-9 classrooms. Before you do this you might also like to get students to explore how much they already know about the horror genre. On our resources page we've put a Horror Plot Creation handout. This handout lists typical settings, characters, orientations and complications you will find in a horror story. In groups, students pick a character, a setting, and 1-2 orientations and complications. Using these elements, they then need to generate a horror story of their own. Students will have a lot of fun coming up with their horror plot and then sharing them with the rest of the class. They will also see how formulaic the horror genre is. Download the resource here: http://www.tickingmind.com.au/resourcedownload

Pencil Face -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MjTb5A68VA

A girl discovers a huge pencil that will draw anything. But what are its motives?

Bump -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U58oZj-fZ6s:

In this classic horror short, two young women alone in a house hear a 'bump' in the night and decide to investigate.

Alma - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58iXypYPNrw

A girl investigates a mysterious doll shop.

Spectre - http://vimeo.com/1228438

What's happening in the background when a man is shaving?

The Facts in The Case of Mister Hollow - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzw8qdXCep8

One picture - what's the story behind it? A unique horror short about vampires.

We particularly recommend playing Pencil Face and Spectre with and without music and asking students to think about the important of music as a technique in horror.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #13 2011

Today's bulletin is partly a short film one, and partly a web 2.0 one, and partly just a 'get the best out of your laptop' one. To begin with, we want to remind people about Keep Video. This is a web tool that allows you to download videos from Youtube. This is a great tool to use if your school blocks Youtube or you have slow wireless at your school making it difficult to show Youtube videos.

The tool can be found here: http://keepvid.com/. To use it, you simply need to cut and paste the internet (or URL) address of the Youtube video you want, visit Keep Video and paste it in the clearly marked box. Keep Video will then give you a number of different file formats you can download the video in. MP4 is best.

You might like to test this out on a favourite video of ours. It's been a viral hit on the net and has now been watched by over 20 millions viewers on Youtube. Some of you may have seen it. It's Ksenyia Simonova's Sand Animation from - surprise, surprise - 'Ukraine's Got Talent'. In real time, Ksenyia creates a series of sand drawings representing Germany's invasion of Ukraine in the Second World War. There is no dialogue, just the sand pictures. No historical context is needed to understand the story - because it could be any place, anywhere. It's and extraordinary short film which your students will be fascinated by. It can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo

One reason we like the film is that it is an amazing illustration of the power of visuals in film. In your class, it can be used as a comprehension activity. To help you do this, we've uploaded to our website a handout you can give to your students. There is eight stills from the video on the handout. After watching the video, discuss with your class what it's about and then get them to put some plot summaries to each picture. You can find the handout here.

You can capture your own stills from films. If you have a PC, it's easy. Simply use the small print screen button up the top of your keyboard somewhere (it's different on different PCs). Play your film and then just click on print screen when there is a visual you want to capture. You can then open a Word document and click on paste and the picture will paste into the document. If you have a Mac you can use the Grab Screen function in Utilities. This will allow you to capture stills from Youtube, but not from films played with DVD Player.

Short Films / Big Ideas #7 2011

In our last edition of Short Films / Big Ideas we looked at the creepy short film Pencil Face. To see what we said about this short film see our blog entry below. For those of you who are fans of creepy films, our next Short Films / Big Ideas post will be the Halloween edition.

However, today we want to look at a brilliant example of a 'meta' film. We've shown this a few times recently in our PDs because it's a great example of film narrative technique. The short film we are talking about is called Plot Device. The plot is thus: A film student is roaming Amazon's online bookstore looking at film making guides when he comes across a mysterious object for sale called 'plot device'. He buys it. When it comes, it turns out to be a large button. What does he does? Of course he presses it. He is instantly swept into a romance film. We know this genre straight away because we see a beautiful woman in a wedding dress running towards him (in romance genre fashion) shouting the words, 'it's always been you.' He presses the button again, and is transported into a new genre. And so he goes on from genre to genre until the resolution of the short film. It's 9 minutes long. And very funny. Watch it here.

There are several interesting things about this film. To begin with, it's an entertaining introduction to the idea of genre. Show the film to your students and ask them to pick out all the different genres or styles of films that are shown. What were the identifying features of each genre? What films have your students seen recently, and what genre do they belong to?

Secondly, the film is a very conscious example of the narrative feature of the 'plot device.' There are two types of problems that can happen in a text: 1) A character problem (called the 'inner' problem); 2) A plot problem (the plot device). In a good story a character has to struggle with and overcome their inner problems. However, this struggle has to first be activated by an external problem arising - an asteroid hurtling towards earth, a new girl on the scene who the protagonist really likes, an enemy, or the discovery of a mysterious object: all these are examples of plot devices - a narrative prompt that forces the character to do something and confront their own problems. 

Have a chat with kids about this and then get them to think about the film they have seen most recently (or can recall the best). Give them each a copy of the Plot Phases handout which can be downloaded from our website here. This steps them through the stages of a narrative and will help them identify the different between the character problem (which they often won't be able to identify) and the plot device (which they often think is the main complication). After this, students can move on to creating their own short stories which contain these two narrative elements.