Learning & Teaching Sequences for Reading – Fiction Level 3-4
Blabber Mouth
Sample text: Blabber Mouth
(Morris Gleitzman, Pan MacMillan, 1992)
For Levels 3–4 Blabber Mouth is a longer fiction text and contains many ideas that would be unfamiliar to students. It comprises a single main plot that gradually evolves. Each chapter deals with a comparatively self-contained event that contributes to the overall plot. Students develop their awareness of how each chapter contributes to the plot and the questions it answers.
It is recommended that the first few chapters of the book be read as an interactive class activity and that it be used to assist students to learn how to read fiction of this type. The focus of the teaching is on students learning to:
- increase their ability to comprehend this type of text
- comprehend and use the conventions of this type of narrative text
- manage and direct their reading activity for an evolving plot.
These activities are intended to provide students with a path into this type of text. Once the students have had the opportunity to improve their knowledge and ability for reading this type of text, those who would be interested in continuing to read the text for personal enjoyment can do so.
The teaching activities recommend both group reading activities, with one or more students reading aloud, and individual silent reading activities. During each teaching session one chapter is read as an interactive group learning activity. The set of teaching and learning activities that follow relate to students reading Chapter 1.
A key focus of the teaching here is for students to improve their knowledge in integrating text information across paragraphs. Students:
- Describe paragraphs in their own words and visualise them. They work out the meanings of unfamiliar words by synthesising text information across sentences.
- Summarise each paragraph and, having read it, say what questions it answers for them and say what they know now.
- Review, summarise and infer across two or three paragraphs, asking, ‘What has this been about?’ They visualise across two or three paragraphs and integrate the images; integrate the main question of each paragraph into a sequence of meanings for the longer text; talk about the sequence of ideas and predict events; and infer possible ideas such as consequences.
A second focus is the awareness that texts are written for a range of purposes and written differently for different readers. Students understand that texts are written from particular sociocultural contexts; that they can be interpreted from multiple perspectives; and that they can identify and infer the techniques used to influence or to persuade them to a particular interpretation; for example, use of language.