Text sets: Australian Aboriginal Identity 1

If you have been following my blog for a while, you will know that I love text sets. That is, picture books or junior novels that come together, sometimes eclectically, that have similar themes or teachings. I have been putting this blog post together for some time, in my thinking.

As literacy educators, we know it is important to encourage children to make text-to-text connections and creating text sets is one way to support students to do this. The titles in the text set at the top of this post came together around a similar concept about Australian Aboriginal Identity in relation to skin colour and indigeneity. 

Text sets combine multiple texts with different genre and text complexities to cater for students' interests and a wide range of abilities.  Multiple text approaches can give voice to marginalised groups, through the different representations of similar issues.  The collections of texts are sometimes referred to as Linked Text Sets (LTS).  For more on the power of text sets, see: 

Elish-Piper, L., Wold, L. S. and Schwingendorf, K. (2014), Scaffolding High School Students’ Reading of Complex Texts Using Linked Text Sets. J Adolesc Adult Liter, 57: 565–574. doi:10.1002/jaal.292

Robb, L. (2002). Multiple texts: Multiple opportunities for teaching and learning. Voices from the Middle, 9(4), 28.

Tracy, K. N., Menickelli, K., & Scales, R. Q. (2017). Courageous Voices: Using Text Sets to Inspire Change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(5), 527-536.

"Black Fella White Fella" is a picture book by Neil Murray based on his iconic song lyrics for the song of the same title that he has performed with the Warumpi band. View a video of the song made with the Papunya school here.                                                                                                                           I love this picture book, not only because I love the song (and secretly Neil Murray LOL - shhh!), but also because it is illustrated by children around Australia and carries such an important message for the world!                                                                                 "Black Fella, White Fella" is such a popular picture book, that I had a little bit of trouble tracking it down. Perhaps it is going through a reprint?  

A big shout out and thank you to Sally from the  Sally Lawrence Education Consultancy who sourced a copy of the picture book for me at short notice and to Sarah from the North Coast Regional Indigenous Education Unit for sending it to me.  You can read more about Sally's work here and the My Island Home project here.  The My Island Home project involved Neil Murray and others mentoring 19 emerging Indigenous artists for a week of songwriting and recording.

To deepen comprehension, students might compare and contrast the picture book and performance versions of the text, "Black Fella, White Fella" by Neil Murray. The lyrics could also be deconstructed for comprehension purposes using my Collaborative Reading Workshop approach.  You can read more about this approach in relation to song lyrics and social justice here: 

Meyer, K. E. (2010). A collaborative approach to reading workshop in the middle years. The reading teacher, 63(6), 501-507.

Popular culture and song lyrics have long been seen as a 'way in' to supporting adolescent literacy development.  To me, song lyrics are not only a 'way in' to literacy learning, but can also be a 'way in' to learning about culture, by 'reading the word and the world' (Freire & Macedo, 1987).

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Reading the word and the world. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.   

This set of picture books features iconic Australian songs and is published by One Day Hill publishing.  The titles in the iconic songs collection of picture books include:

• Solid Rock by Shane Howard;
• Took the Children Away by Archie Roach; and
• My Island Home by Neil Murray.

This series includes the titles pictured above (the iconic songs set) and "From Little Things, Big Things Grow" by Paul Kelly, as well.  

Read more about Neil Murray's work at the publisher's site here or Neil Murray's blog here. You can also view the Warumpi band singing, "My Island Home" here.  

In a previous blog post, I share about Australian Indigenous Perspectives and more about further these iconic song titles.  You can read this post on the Australian Teachers' Collaborative blog here.

Well, that's enough for one day :)  I think this blog post is going to become part of a small series...If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading!  As usual, if you have other ideas, I would love to read them - please share in the comments section below.

Have a great week everyone!

Images reproduced from Magabala Books with permission.  I was unable to contact One Day Hill publishers for permission to reproduce the image of Neil Murray with "My Island Home".  Many attempts were made.

Nick Bland's New Release: Monster Chef (terrific for Halloween and not so scary) with freebies

Well it's official!  I am in love with picture books and one of my favourite authors is fellow Aussie, Nick Bland.
You can hardly imagine my delight when I found his newly published picture book, Monster Chef and I began making connections straight away to Halloween and his other picture book, A Monster Wrote Me a Letter.

I love Nick Bland's writing style with his rollicking use of rhyme and imagery.  

Marcel is the Monster Chef and he has a terrible problem - he wasn't very scary!!!  But, what he did like to do was cook and he makes earthworm spaghetti, hot cactus pies, smelly-sock soup and a cockroach surprise!  Can you imagine the fun the children would have making up imaginary recipes for these gastronomical delights? 

As with all good narratives, this one has the problem of Marcel not being scary even though he is a monster and the solution is actually very clever and creative!  

This is a terrific picture book for Halloween as it isn't scary; it's actually very funny.  Now for some freebies for both books:

Free teaching notes for Monster Chef can be found here and here.  

Interestingly, in my search for goodies for both of these picture books, I stumbled across another book with the same title, "Monster Chef" (different author) so a compare and contrast could be used, however the second title is part of the Vampire School series by Peter Bentley (You can read about it here). I haven't read any titles from this series, but if you have please leave a comment below this post.

You can read about A Monster Wrote Me a Letter here, with excerpts from the book to give you a flavour of the author's engaging style and there are also free teaching notes online. These shared reading notes were freely available on the internet for A Monster Wrote Me a Letter.

Other ideas and activities for using Nick Bland's picture books have been pinned on my pinterest board here.
We don't really celebrate Halloween in schools over here in Australia, so that's why I am keen on books that aren't too scary and I love companion texts and text sets.  

Last year I reviewed Creepy Carrots and provided a freebie for that. You can read that blog post here.  It's another good picture book for Halloween which isn't too scary.  

In fact, all of these picture books could be used to discuss fears and how sometimes our fears can be imagined.  Scaredy Squirrel is also great for this, as is the Children's Book Council Award short-listed picture book Parachute.  You can read my blog post about those two picture books here and pick up another freebie here.

Teachers have told me that their students make text-to-self connections quite easily, but need extra support with making text-to-world or text-to-text connections.  That's why I love it when we can find texts to compare and contrast and explicitly model making connections and venn diagrams are an easy way to do this.

Click on the image below to pick up a venn diagram to compare Nick Bland's two titles: Monster Chef and A Monster Wrote Me a Letter:

Please follow my blog (using the links in the right hand comment) to accept this giveaway.

Please leave a comment below if you can think of any other titles that could be used in a similar way.