The Red Tree

This week in year 7 English we have been keeping up our paragraph hamburgers but also trying to add critical thinking. To help with this we have been talking about literal and inferential interpretation.

We have been using one of my favourite books, “The Red Tree” by Shaun Tan. This book has countless learning opportunities for English classes and is an easily accessible text for most kids. It is the perfect combination of simple words and complex images. We have been using this book for a week now and every time we pick it up almost all of my students have found something new and interesting to talk about.

We began the week by examining the front cover and doing a brainstorm on the content of the text. We then chose 3 words from the brainstorm that we thought were most likely to reflect what the text is about.

Next we only read the words of the book, without seeing any of the pictures on the inside. As we read, each student made a storyboard of 8 images. We discussed visualisation and how words can put images in your head.

The next thing we did was read through the text together. We spoke about the meaning of the text (and how different people make different meanings) and the intended audience. Students were then split into two levelled groups. The upper group reread the book and then chose a picture to deconstruct. With the lower group we read through the text together and very explicitly identified the meaning of images and words.

Later in the week, we began to review the paragraph hamburger so spent some time focusing on how to improve our writing. Finally we read through the book together again. At each page we stopped and made a list of words that reflected the mood or theme of the page. From this list we practiced writing a paragraph to examine the literal and inferential meaning of the page. We did one together and then students wrote on their own.