This Week's Creative Writing Class

It's not far from the end of the year and the end of this subject at my school. The electives have been rearranged to make room for one more period of science and that means scrapping most of the electives and arranging the remaining ones differently. And my Year 10 students only have a very few weeks before they do their exams and leave us. Between now and then, there is at least one Year 10 excursion on a Tuesday, when I have this class, and Cup Day.

So I have to make the best of what time is left. I think my policy of stories that are short is working. There's less chance of someone starting off a story that just can't be finished. One of the girls has started one that looks like it might not work because it will be too long and never finished. She isn't sure where she is going with it and won't take my advice to write the last scene. I will have to sit her down and get her to plan it out, or ask her to drop it and try one of the story starters I have supplied. She has been doing quite well so far, but this isn't going to work.

I must think about this some time today and leave some instructions, because next week, I am the one who is not going to be there, at least till the second half of the session - there is a funeral to attend, alas! Fortunately not too far away and there will be other staff going. I might grab everyone when I return and set up a round robin story we can all write together. I will need to keep the theme simple.

Two of my other students have proved to be a pleasant surprise - nobody in this class is ever going to be a professional writer, but they have come up with the goods regularly.

But so far, there is only one student who has not quite managed to produce anything publishable - not finish, anyway. However, this week, I persuaded her to go back to her first piece for the semester and take a section of it to expand. It worked, sort of. She did finish something, that needs editing, but she finished it. Unfortunately, she has been a bit distracted recently and sneaked in some time doing on line job applications when she should have been writing.

Still - she managed some poems the other week, when we went to an education web site that does templates, and read them aloud to the class. I think that worked. It was very exciting to see her write - and read out - completed poems. That told me that even a student who is distracted can manage something if it's structured enough. It's not that she can't write, it's just that she starts stories and can't finish them and then won't drop them as soon as she realises this. She did tell me that she writes in Wattpad(I don't have her details) and I believe her, but Wattpad encourages the authors to break everything up into short chapters, so they simply keep writing till they run out of steam and call it a chapter. Not good. And there just isn't time to encourage her to break that habit. We have one session a week and she doesn't have the Internet at home, so doesn't update her work there.

What can I do now? Any suggestions?

Today's Writing Class: it worked - yay!

This semester's class is smaller than last; partly that's because some students who wanted to join us left it till too late. I wouldn't mind, but the rolls are being updated to be marked online, would you believe! Changes at this stage will make some headaches.

Anyway, I have four lovely students, one of whom had left me for music last semester and returned this semester - clearly she made her change on time. She wrote me one lovely piece on the first day back and hasn't done much since then, due to one thing and another. Today she wasn't there, unfortunately. Another student, the sole boy, had handed in a delightful, funny short piece about a library and a ghost. That's going to be published in the school anthology.  A third student did a gorgeous, touching story in second person, about the memory of a young cousin being accidentally burned and having to be rushed to hospital. That one has been handed over to the teacher editing the anthology. The fourth student, who was in my history class last year) was struggling.

So I decided to do something that everyone could have a go at and, hopefully, succeed, even the young lady who was struggling. I have prepared her a template for autobiography, but left it for another week.

We talked about fairytales. They all named stories they quite liked and said why. We discussed those - I pointed out, among other things, that "Cinderella" is the basis of just about every YA romance ever written - that made them giggle.

Then we read "Kate Crackernuts". In fact, one of the students said, "Miss, what's your favourite fairytale?"

"I'm glad you asked that, because we're going to read it!" I told her with a smile. And we did. Then I asked what differences they could see from other fairytales of this kind - the stepsister is not mean, the girl rescues the boy, etc.

I finally asked them to simply retell their story of choice, simply to get them going, giving them twenty minutes to do it. The idea was that when this was done, they could start to think about retelling from the viewpoint of another character. I also urged them, when they could to read the story written last semester by one of the class, in which the story of Snow White was seen from the viewpoint of the Queen. (This is something the school calls "exemplar work")

All I wanted them to do today was the first retelling, but they were having such a good time that one of them completely rewrote "The Three Little Pigs" as "The Three Big Humans"(and the cannibalistic wolf) and the student who'd been struggling wrote an entirely original fairytale! And finished it! Oh, it's not brilliant, it will need plenty of editing, but she finished it! Editing next week. Hopefully this will have broken some of the block she's been experiencing. The other girl commented that it was a pity their other classmate hadn't been there. I agreed that she would have enjoyed it.

Fingers crossed it all continues to work out, but for today - it worked! Yay!

A Writing Enrichment Day That Enriched Me As Well!

Last Friday I went with a small group of students to Footscray Park campus if Victoria University, where they were to do writing workshops with people who are professional writers and also teach there.

I went to Fiction A with a student who was on her own - the others had all been allocated Fiction B. The tutor said that she expected teachers in the class to take part in the workshop, and she herself would be writing.

We started with two short stories which we then sat down in groups and discussed, using questions she had given to go with them. After reporting back to the group, we were given slips of paper pulled from a jar to get us started. She said she didn't mind if we swapped or even wrote our own stuff as long as we wrote something. I personally prefer to limit myself to what I have been given, so I stuck to what I had been given: Flinders Street Station at 2.00 am, a bright burst of light.

Here's what I wrote in the 15-20 minutes we were given:

I'd just missed the last train home. And the last tram. There were no Nightrider buses around and not much left in my wallet to pay for one of the cabs waiting at the taxi rank outside the station; I 'd spent it all at the fan auction that afternoon, buying an autographed photo of Harrison Ford. I had to have it! It was signed back in the seventies when he  was young and gorgeous. If I'd gone to an auction in the US or bought it on eBay, it would have cost four or five times the price I'd paid.

The street wasn't empty; there was music coming from Young and Jackson's pub across the road and a few drunks staggering along. But I felt alone. Should I head back to the hotel and see if James would let me crash on his room floor? He'd say yes, but for the wrong reasons. Still, I couldn't stay here. There was always the hotel foyer if he was a pain.

Shivering in my Princess Leia costume, I sighed and started back up Swanston St. Started, but didn't get far. Something came out of the sky with a flash of light and landed in the middle of the tram tracks outside St Paul's. It was smaller than the smallest flying saucer I'd ever seen in any movie, about twice the size of a van. Nobody else even glanced at it. Hey, Melbourne!

Someone stepped out. He was shorter than me, much shorter. His skin was green and there was a comb on his head instead of hair, but otherwise, he could pass for a human male. Pulling something out of his pocket, he gestured at me. It was a flyer for Continuum 12, the science fiction convention I was attending.

"Mm?"  he squeaked. "Ah, aah, mm?"

He was asking directions, I guessed. Stunned, I pointed towards the other end of Swanston Street.

"Thx!" he said.

Thanks?

"Uh, you're welcome."

As he started towards his tiny spaceship I called, "Wait! Can you give me a lift?"

He seemed to understand me, because he grinned and waved invitingly at the ship.

I climbed in beside him. It was squashy, but I couldn't help grinning myself. Wait till James saw me arrive!

The End

Not brilliant, but hey, 15 minutes! I don't expect kids to do even this much. I think I can use these ideas in my own class. It will make them feel they have achieved something. Last semester's class was mainly students who love writing and do it in their own time. This term I have one of them back, but of the rest, one wants to learn how to finish a story to help with her literacy class, the rest aren't quite sure. It just seemed a nice thing to do. So their needs will be different. And this seems like a good way to get them going, because they won't be wanting to do their own stories to publish online.

After lunch - when I chatted with writer Michael Hyde, who was doing a life writing workshop in the afternoon - I went to a poetry workshop with another student who was on her own. It wouldn't have been my choice, but I wanted to keep her company and her face brightened when I told her I was going with her.

And in the end, it was good. The tutor was Sherryl Clarke, who visited our school last year, compliments of YABBA. She started it off with getting us to cut up bits of newspaper, choosing words which we then had to use in a poem. I ended up with a sales catalogue! Still, I had a go.

An open letter to a millionaire philanthropist (newspaper cutouts)

Dick Smith,

Please do more

To save the reef

From dynamite and mines.

Take action now!

40 per cent of marine species need you!

Call Mac

And talk about marine life NOW!

We finished with a poem using three words chosen at random from a pile everyone had created, with adjectives - say, turquoise rather than blue - nouns, senses. The deal was, you had to use each word at least three times in the poem. My words were shopping centre, japonica and taste.  I suspect japonica was written by one of the other teachers! Still, I wrote my poem. Here it is:

The Senses of Home (take three words, shuffle around)

Exhausted by Boxing Day sales,

I sit in a cafe at the shopping centre food court,

Sipping, the taste of camellia leaves

On my tongue,

And think of the japonica waving

Outside the window of a home long gone,

Camellia Japonicas also grow in tubs

Everywhere in the shopping centre,

The smells from the food court,

The shopping centre bustle,

The smooth table under my hands,

Even the taste of the tea in my mouth,

Leaves of the camellia plant,

Or taste of chocolate mud cake

Cannot match the sight of flaming red japonica,

The sight that speaks of home.

And here's the one we had to do with no more than three lines:

Joyfully,

I watch my class at work,

Promise of tomorrow.

Not bad, three poems in a session after having written none since university!

This session might also find its way into my Creative Writing classes...

So it was as much a professional development for me as for the students.

Farewell Creative Writers!

So, last week I said goodbye to my Creative Writing class for this semester. They were all Year 10 and though we were supposed to have one more class this week, an exam was slotted in for this afternoon. No more.

Everyone finished something. There was still some editing to do for most of them. Derby managed to finish a second story, though she was in New Zealand for a week. In between preparing for her role as bridesmaid at her family wedding, she was writing a story about a girl who wants revenge for her brother's death and then realises he wouldn't want that. We sat down and edited it and then it was ready to go up on her blog.

James had actually finished a short piece at home. It needed light editing, but was otherwise okay. Certainly better than the long thing he was working on for most of the semester and that overwhelmed him. Next semester I will not let my students write stories more than a few hundred words long and I will be making them plan out their stories. I may be a pantser, but for the purposes of this class, they will have to be planners.

Miller was given his editing, but spent the period writing yet more of his story! And not editing it.

Aravinthan copied and pasted his autobiography into his blog page as one piece of writing. Not exciting, but finished. He missed a lot of classes.

Ricky and I sat down and edited his silly but fun little story about the adventures of Puffy the Puffer
fish.

Inaam was working hard on her horror story. She hadn't finished the editing at the end of the class, but is reliable enough to finish it in her own time. She has been a pleasant surprise, working slow but steady this year.

What will next term be like? I will miss them.

Near The Home Straight

This week I had a visitor in my Creative Writing Class. We have to do this, it's compulsory.

We read Wild Africa, by Justin D'Ath before going on to the writing. The learning intention was ""To learn from reading".  It really is a good idea to do this, because they can discuss the good and bad points of someone else's story before going on to their own.

I asked the class's lowest student to do another outline, which is all he is capable of doing.  Next week, which will be the second last session of this subject for most of the class, I will see if I can persuade him to write an extra sentence with each of the questions. But that's about all I can get out of him. He has missed a lot of classes anyway.

I rejoiced when one student finally finished her story, but it needs a LOT of fixing of punctuation, spelling and grammar. I began by pasting it into a Word document. I spent at least an hour on editing, but it's nowhere near finished. I might ask her to begin by doing a spelling and grammar check. That won't do all of it, but will help.

Still - it's finished! This student has been slow but steady. Only one story, but she got on with it.

The others got something done, anyway, though not complete.

I think I'm learning as much as they are how to do this and how NOT to do it.

Two Classes ...

A double period yesterday of Creative Writing, another, today, of EAL.

I wanted to give my Year 7 EAL class a break from the grammar folders through which they're working - you can't do a double period of grammar worksheets anyway and they get restless doing the same sort of stuff every week. Lily, their regular teacher, agreed. She had suggested some spelling exercises from a book she is checking out, but hasn't gone very far with it yet and it's a "course" you're supposed to do weekly. It also, as I found when I opened it, has references to "your rules booklet" (what rules booklet?).

In the end, I used her ESL Games book and a literacy exercise on syllables. They picked up the syllables very quickly - some had already done syllables in their home countries, but even those who hadn't done it before got it right once I put the rules up on the board.

The Games book included a vocabulary exercise on transport and a game board using the vocab. They played the game and seemed to enjoy it.

The second half of the lesson we went online to do Freerice, a vocabulary game in which for every right answer 10 grains of rice are donated to charity. They all got decent scores and enjoyed the game, learning new words as they went.

Next week, back to grammar exercises, but with some extras.

I only had four students in Creative Writing yesterday. That gave me the chance to sit down with each individual student and discuss what they were working on. Two of the boys admitted that their stories were just not working for them. One of them said he was working on a story in his literacy class - he had just begun and it was about a puffer fish, a la Finding Nemo. We went through the outline together and broke it down till he had an outline from beginning to end. I begged him not to make it more than a few hundred words.

The other boy had actually started his replacement story, but wasn't sure where it was going. Again, we discussed it and wrote out an outline, beginning to end. He came up with some ideas as we talked and became quite excited about it. Fingers crossed!

The next student refused to admit the story was too much for him, said he liked it - but has only done a few paragraphs. So we discussed it and I wrote the outline and just as I was writing "and he goes home" my student said, "Oh, but that's not the end, Miss!" Finally, I suggested - firmly - that he write the story to the ending we had done so far and, if he had time, he could do a sequel, "The Return of ..." . He won't, of course. But if I can get him to finish this one, I will heave a sigh of relief.

Inaam, the only girl, was bogged down in her horror story. She told me what she had in mind for the ending and we worked out how to get there. Hopefully, the outline will help her. She is the only one who hasn't been weaving from past tense to present and back again - most of her errors are punctuation and lack of capitals at the start of sentences.

I think that class worked well - let's see if those individual discussions made a difference.

Creative Writing yet again

So, last week, we read The Leather Jacket at the start of the period and that went over quite well. The story involves a boy following a girl around. She asks him to run naked in front of a gold game to prove his love for her - and then nicks off with his expensive leather jacket which belongs to his brother. The kids were highly indignant about it, but it made for a good discussion before they went back to their own stories, about how well it worked as a story.

Aravinthan finally completed his autobiographical outline, about all I was going to get out of him. I think Miller managed one more paragraph. Derby and I sat down to discuss what her next story will be(zombies) but she has to see the doctor tomorrow and will be off in New Zealand the week after next, for a family event. Inaam was still having trouble with the Internet at home, but got some more typed up. One student was absent. The others had - yet again - forgotten to bring in the USB sticks with their stories, and did I mention more Internet troubles? And writer's block... sigh! I wish I hadn't told them that term.

 "I have writer's block, Miss!"

"Okay, we'll have a look at it and see what we can do."

"Um... I forgot to bring my USB stick and I'm having trouble with the Internet connection at home."

"Well, can you write an ending for it and fill in the rest?"

"I'm having writer's block about the end..."

AAARGH! And this is a perfectly nice student who does write quite a lot when he has his story with him.

I have prepared another outline for Aravinthan, on sport, on the recommendation of our integration aide head honcho.

When he's filled in the current one...

Creative Writing - again!

This week's Creative Writing class was somewhere in the middle of finishing things off. I had a lesson plan all worked out, which involved reading a good short story and discussing why it was good, or if they thought so. We have already had a look at the Hero's Journey through film trailers and KISS - which was what a short story should be, because some of them are overwhelming themselves with stories that could end up as novels, and there just isn't time for that, especially because the stories need editing - and the end of this term is the end of the course for most of them. And being Year 10, they all have work experience to attend the last two weeks.

Last week's lesson was chaotic; we couldn't book the library and when we returned to the room we have been using for a classroom - not having our own, as the room we were allocated is, in fact, a staffroom - we found that another class was occupying it and using one set of laptops. The other set was being used by a full-sized class. Fortunately, I was able to coax six laptops from the other teacher, whose class was smallish like mine.

That's the trouble with having a small class: you don't feel you should have the cheek to book a computer room and if the laptop class sets and the library are unavailable, what can you do with a writing class? I need some emergency activities. If I hadn't had access to the computers I probably would have gone straight into the Hero's Journey class story - but I really wanted them to get on with their own stories.

Last week, Inaam was having trouble with writer's block. I suggested that she write the end and fill in the rest. It worked; the story is complete - but she needed to type it, because the dear old-fashioned girl starts everything in longhand.

James had told me he was finished with his first story and had begun another, but admitted this week that the first one wasn't quite finished. He had writer's block too and unlike Inaam, he froze near the end!

Ricky, who joined us late, had barely started his tale of alien invasion, having only gone as far as the Australian heroes being taken from an Arctic base and walking towards the alien HQ.

Two students were absent and one had other commitments, though she joined us near the end (and, o joy, emailed me her complete, edited story! It is on its way to the school anthology.

Anyway,  they all grabbed a laptop and started writing before I could do more, so I left it till the last half hour, when I read with them two short pieces of slush I had kept for them since early this year, and invited them to work out which we had allowed to go to the next round and which we had rejected. They got it right, and for the right reasons. One was a story outline, with very little actually going on and way too complex for what it was. The other had only two characters, a problem to solve and was complete in itself. It worked. They remembered my talk about KISS!

I've started reading a story with them each week - next week we'll do the one I originally had planned for this week. It's a nice, humorous story from the Trust Me! anthology. I'd like, if possible to compose a Hero's Journey story outline with them, to help give ideas to those who are ready for their next story.

Wish me luck!

A Term of Creative Writing ... Some Reflections

This year I started a new subject. Well, two if you count EAL, but the EAL teacher has been supplying me with material to use and so far it has been straightforward parts of speech. Yesterday we did adverbs, using the worksheets she had supplied and ending with a spelling race (adverbs, of course). In general I think they are getting it and I might do a quick test to see how much they have absorbed in the parts of speech, but it will have to be after we've covered the material the teacher wants covered for that period. It does make things easier for both of us - she can focus on other things when she has them and I have somewhere to start.

Creative Writing, though - I'm currently teaching seven Year 10 students. Well, six, really. The seventh student has turned up twice the whole term and written a single paragraph. And that was his autobiography because on a test to see what he could do I concluded he was not capable of so much as a story outline, let alone a story. I did learn from that first paragraph that he has a brother who is a Bollywood actor! But then I didn't see him again. And he didn't seem to feel that he was obliged to tell me more.

Recently, we were joined by Ricky, who decided to drop out of his other subject to do this. I was told he couldn't afford the fees, but the welfare teacher told me later that when she offered to help him out on the fees he said that no, he was happy to do Creative Writing. He has begun a story about an alien invasion and a task force sent to the alien HQ somewhere in Russia to fight back. We did have some discussions about the inadvisability of dropping from a plane near enough for the enemy to see them and he rewrote. As the good guys were Australian I did have to ask if he was sending them all the way from Australia to do this and he decided they would be coming from a base somewhere in the Arctic. And he got out Google Maps to do some checking. He hasn't gone very far, but he's only been with us for two sessions so far.

Tez was writing a story about having been kidnapped by a gangster to whom the father owed money, but it was too positive - the girl was given a nice room and happily bounced up and down on the bed. I suggested that someone kidnapped would be terrified, not giggling, and that if she was planning a romance here she would have to make the kidnapper at least a bit sympathetic. She took my point and had a go, but last week told me she didn't feel that story was working and she had started another one. That was okay, but I haven't seen it yet. She did show me her blurb, which sounded rather depressing, but hey, teenage girls...  The others all saved their stories into our Public Share and I've sent them to myself to read, perhaps over the term break.

James is still in the middle of a fantasy tale about a thief who got into trouble and was on the run when he picked up a magical glove that did nasty things. It's promising, but still needs a lot of work. And the hero is currently in a prison cell with not much idea of where it is or how he got there and the story is not properly begun.

Inaam made a promising start to a horror story about a bunch of girls on a sleepover who suddenly find themselves out in the cold woods. I must say, Inaam's story was a pleasant surprise, though the punctuation was all over the place. We went through it together and she spent a period fixing it because, as I told her, there wasn't much wrong with the story itself.

Miller has managed about three paragraphs. In a term. The last one finished abruptly in the middle of a sentence. Sigh!

Derby's story has turned into a version of Snow White, seen from the Queen's viewpoint. It has some nice touches of humour in it, but she has suddenly realised that Queen Ivana isn't much older than Snow White and Snow White's parents put a curse on her and there are no dwarfs, because the Queen accidentally killed her before any thought of doing it on purpose. I like the humour, but this really doesn't look like it's going anywhere as yet.

I did find one thing that worked was the story template. Well, it worked for those of them who are willing to even consider the ending of the story. Derby says it has helped her to break the story down and look at it again.

Another things that works - or would, if I could get them to post during the holidays - is the class blog. They have begun to comment on each other's stories and they are doing so politely and I like that.

Thing is, I am wondering if ANYTHING will be ready and edited by the time they finish. And I was hoping for three stories each!

I have been doing this as a writer trying to share my own writing habits, but it doesn't seem to be quite working. And I'm not prepared to turn this into English Extensions.

I'm hoping to be able to get the school to give us some money for a writing workshop that will cross two campuses. That might inspire something. At this stage, most of them have eight sessions left!

Rats!

Creative Writing, EAL And Me

I've had two classes each - a double period - in Creative Writing and Year 7 EAL. So far so good, but I'm still learning.

The Year 7 EAL I'm doing in co-operation with the regular EAL teacher. Last year a couple of colleague had the job of teaching the students while the rest of the class was doing Italian or Vietnamese - no point making the poor kids do those when they haven't even mastered English yet! It did happen one year when the timetable had problems, but not now.

So what do you do? Strictly speaking , it's called "Cultural Studies" and there is a colleague on another campus who has prepared a whole year's classes on it as such. But I asked the EAL teacher what she would prefer me to do. She said she would prefer that I complete activities she is doing and vice versa. She gave me her lesson plans for the term. That has helped so far, but we have a hard time getting together when she has six period days before I take the class. And her lesson plans are really intended for herself, as aids to memory; she has been doing it for so long, she knows exactly what she means. Unfortunately, I don't, so have to ask, when she can spare a few minutes. Or else work it out and add my own bits, which I did.

The first week I took the students' photos and printed them out for a poster "about me" that was to be put up in the classroom. She had prepared a template for them to use. Yesterday they had to do work on nouns. She had supplied a work sheet, but there were other things to do, such as find a text they could use to highlight the nouns and work out what kind they were. And she hadn't brought that to work. So I went on line and found a fairly simple folk tale, which was still not quite simple enough; I had to adapt it. And because this was a double period, I knew the work sheet alone was not going to be enough to keep them going. I prepared "noun cards" for them to sort as to type, in groups.

In the end, with the help of the volunteer from the Ardoch Foundation, I was able to keep it going for two periods and we each took a table of students. The noun cards didn't get used until the next period, when the regular teacher used them as a warm up before proceeding to verbs. I did wonder if they would remember the noun types, though they seemed to have got it in my class. My colleague told me that they had; she said when they came into class, "So, you're now experts on nouns. Tell me about them!" and asked questions which they were able to answer. Success!

Creative Writing has the potential to be a huge success or a complete disaster. So far so good. The first lesson was introductory. My colleague on another campus is doing a very structured class, starting from the beginning. She has a larger class than mine and doesn't know them, having been moved from her other campus, so that's understandable; I have shared some of my material with her, though, the story starters, and she is happy with them.

If I asked my students to do basic writing exercises I suspect they would rebel. They know what they are doing, or believe they do; they just need my support.

So the first week I did an introductory class, beginning with showing them books by teenagers and telling them that just because you're young doesn't mean you can't succeed in this area. I talked about writers who plan way ahead and writers who write by the seat of their pants. I'm a pantser, but it would work better for them to be planners.

I prepared a set of story starters. On one side of the sheet were story starters taken from the Melbourne Writers' Festival student competition, Write Across Victoria, including one that had won a prize for a student from our school. On the other side, as a form of "differentiation" for the students who might need something simpler, I placed some much simpler story starters of my own.

Amazing how much I learned from this. It wasn't only the less capable writers who chose them, it was some of the good ones as well - it inspired them as the others didn't. Lesson number 1, Sue: don't make assumptions.

We went through the complex story starters first and I invited them to think about what kind of stories they might be, eg one was clearly Steampunk. Amazing the range of ideas that came from a single story starter that began with "I remember the day they came for me" and went on to describe fighting and clash of steel on steel. Everything from totalitarian state to ninjas! And one of the students, who is a huge Steampunk fan, nevertheless started with this one, writing a gruesome tale of slave takers killing parents to take the daughter.

Anyway, I got them started and Tuesday this week, they were continuing on. I learned another lesson I should have understood last week, preparing a story template with a basic "who is your hero, where does it happen, who are her friends/enemies, what is the problem, how is it solved" format. I thought it might help one girl who is having trouble getting started (and I came into class to find that she had decided her first page and a half just wasn't working, so yes, it did help her). Two others also used it, including one who had stuck fast on "I blacked out" with no idea where to go from there. We discussed her story, which was about an evil queen who didn't want to be evil but was under a curse. Then I offered her the template to enable her to break it down and she said that yes, it did help, very much, looking at it that way. Lesson 2, repeat of Lesson 1: don't make assumptions!

Another student I had thought might not do much last week had brought in a plan every bit as complex as the J. K Rowling one I had shown them the first week. She was typing away happily. Apparently her sister also writes and had shown her how to do this.

So that's working and when at the end of the period I asked them whether they were enjoying so far, they all agreed with huge smiles.

Only thing is, how do i gently persuade most of them we need some sessions when they read out their stories to each other? One of them agreed before class that she would read out hers and I wrote a Steampunk story using the story starter, so the two of us read our stories out and the others were gently critical of mine and I praised them. But they look like deer in headlights when I suggest they might do the same.

I have to think about it.

This Year... And Next

Each year I have had to do something different. From Year 11 English to junior ESL (or EAL as it's now known), then on to Year 8 English and Pathways, the homeroom subject. And each time I managed to learn to handle a subject - and I did very well at Pathways - I was given another challenge. This year's challenge has been teaching history.

I love history - but loving something isn't necessarily the same as teaching it. Just because you enjoy reading about something doesn't always mean that you can pass it on.

Have I done well? I'd like to think so, but the truth is, I have had to do the same as everyone else and bullshit my way through, asking for help every now and then from more experienced staff. Sometimes you have to do that. Some things have worked, others haven't.

Making iMovies worked the first time. If I had to teach history again, I would use that, but find a way to make the kids comfortable with it and learn more about it myself. For example, in English, Literature Circles, this year students were allowed to use iMovie to prepare book trailers. They had learned from me in history how to do it.

 That sort of worked, but what none of us had realised was that you couldn't get back to the unfinished task on the school iPads unless you had left it there. So some students who had made a book trailer - unfinished - on iMovie and saved it to the school's Public Share couldn't finish it. What they had done was quite good, but looked a bit silly in the blank grey bits. We - my colleague and I -accepted it anyway, because they had done their best. If I was doing this next year, I would make sure that they spent the entire double period on it, first collecting photos, then slotting them into place.

We had two classes joined for Literature Circles because mine was too small to do it without merging classes - and since we were on at the same time, we would have been competing for resources and space. Two classes together worked last year, but not quite as well as last year, because we had a larger number of difficult students and several integration students and only one aide available to help - last year we had two.

Still, we worked out as best we could which students would go into which groups and which books they could handle.

Some things worked, others didn't - and there were a few students who were given books too difficult for them, which it took us too long to realise. We did make some late changes, giving those students easier books which they were to read by themselves and produce a PowerPoint as their response - the simplest thing to do.

There were a few who had handed in very little this year and were not about to begin now, but we did what we could. I hope they'll mature next year.

We finished with a reflection by the students about what they had gotten out of it. That will help for next year.

One difficult student admitted to me "My behaviour hasn't been stellar this year, has it?" I agreed that it hadn't, but at the time I was talking with him about a story I had asked him to rewrite so it can go into the school anthology and persuading him to put his name on it, since he now had something to be proud of.

That's now happening. His story will be in the next anthology and he will be able to show off a bit. Maybe next year he will have matured? He was the student whose group messed up their podcast.

My history students did their posters and Powerpoints and booklets on the Aztecs. I've put up the posters, which are very good. I've done their last test for the year and am pleased at how well they all did - apart from one student who had been away a lot, everyone got high marks, including my most difficult student who has been improving and got full marks.

My survey of my literacy students worked well. Despite there being some who had been noisy and rude, even they ticked "agree" or "strongly agree" for questions as to how supportive/helpful,etc. I had been (and I overheard one say, "Oh, yes, she is, she really is!" And he was one who had given me a headache many times.

If I had these classes next year I would have a better idea what to do.

But I have been told that next year will be different again, with yet another challenge. . Creative Writing! I have never had writing lessons myself, so how do I give lessons to others? I have been thinking about this carefully. All I can do is offer them the chance to write and submit and the benefit of my own experience as a writer. I'm taking a little survey of students who have signed up for it, to find out what they hope to get out of it. There hasn't been the chance to get together with the other two CW teachers, though I have sent emails and spoken to one. They're both English teachers and will have to make the best of their own experience.

I will have a Year 7 EAL class, but I believe it is straightforward, just a double period a week while the other students are doing Vietnamese or Italian. I think I can handle that, if I discuss it with the EAL teacher.

I'm looking after the Year 10 Psychology students once a week, but I used to do that anyway till this year and it didn't count as part of my allotment.

And of course, there will be Sunlit (literacy class). Hopefully, I will continue with the same reading level as this year. I'm quite comfortable with this subject and actually felt left out one day when everyone else had begun and mine hadn't been sorted out yet.

I'm very tired and there's still so much to do!

8A Podcasts Rocket And Sparky!

Republished from Livejournal

• Yesterday morning, 8A completed podcasts. They weren't brilliant, but they worked. Thing is, I never have more than fifteen anyway, because the rest are in ESL class. Yesterday, four were absent, two were on yard duty, one was on in-house suspension, two had to be sent off to sub school for sheer rudeness(but only till they had finished reading and rehearsing the play), one had to accompany them there. At one point, I looked around the library and saw SIX KIDS! But the two badly behaved boys returned and got some recording done. One of them was actually quite a good Eddie, the hero/heroine of Rocket And Sparky, a play based on Edwina Harvey's short story of the same name... Except his group ruined their otherwise not-bad podcast by inserting swear words. I don't know why they did it except it seemed a good idea at the time, because as soon as they had finished, they admitted to me that they had added swear words and I probably wouldn't like it. 
•  I listened and they were right, I didn't like it. I didn't yell. I simply looked reproachfully at the ringleader and told him how an otherwise good podcast had been ruined and what a shame, because I had written the role of Eddie especially for him(well, I did hear his voice in my head while I wrote, anyway - "Eddie" was originally a girl, but I have a mostly male class)He looked shamed, deleted the podcast and called out, "Okay, everyone, let's have another crack at it." There wasn't time, unfortunately. I may have to find a lunchtime when they can do this.
  
  Two other boys did a good job, except they had to take on all the roles and one of them in particular sounded the same whatever part he played. At one point, the other boy was reading a dialogue between two characters without changing either voice. But he had the nous to begin with an introduction explaining who was playing what.
  
  The three girls did quite a good job and when I showed them a YouTube video of a camel bleating they kept it to play on a second iPad when Rocket was on. How clever! The others just read the script.
  
  So it worked, sort of. I got even the difficult kids to record - I suspect the swearing was a last-minute idea. That group actually came up with a silly but amusing bit of music with a camel theme to play at the beginning - Rocket is a camel and the setting is a desert. Their podcast would have been the best of the three if it weren't for the swearing. They used the script, they just stuck in extra - and I think they were already sorry when they told me.
  This was in response to being ordered to "teach a play". And finding nothing of interest in our few battered class sets. And writing my own, using a friend's story.
  
  Who would have thought, when I started teaching, that you could do this sort of thing? High technology was showing slides. Maybe we could have recorded a play but there would have been one old, battered school tape recorder.
  
  Amazing!
  
  Oh, and Edwina Harvey wants us to see if we can sell the playlet to the NSW School Magazine. I'm pursuing it. If it could entertain a difficult Year 8, why not a Grade 6?

Further Adventures In Year 8

Remember that student who got working when I gave him something he thought he could do? Two weeks and I haven't had to yell at him. Yet. Fingers crossed. It's an ongoing thing.

Last week, I started with the play thing. We were told that according to a document called "Scope and sequence" we had to teach a play. What play? Any play. But all we had were those dreadful, shabby class sets - and the only one I could remotely live with was lent to another campus for the term. And I wasn't even sure what we were supposed to DO with the play. Teach it as a text? Just read it? Make them do their own? None of these were possible with the supplies we had and my students, some of whom are simply too shy to read aloud and others who won't take it seriously.

I wrote my own. And got the kids to read it with the original short story on which it was based. Who has time to do something original? And then I got them to practise it and play with Garage Band, so they can do it as a podcast. I hope I can get them going on Monday to actually DO the podcast. They really seemed to enjoy it.

Fingers crossed!

Experiments In History Classes

I have a number of students who just can't cope with Year 8 work but aren't listed as integration students or funded as such. Even where they are, we have a limited number of aides to help. I wish I knew why we're receiving funding for more students and there are fewer aides, but there you are.  I have to make the best of it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I do sometimes corner one or another of our aides, who are all kind people who know their jobs very well, and ask for an opinion of a piece of work I've prepared for a particular student.

In this case, the student was a very difficult young man who has a way of running around the classroom doing nothing except socialise and claim that he "helped" another student who has done a decent job of his own assignment. Occasionally he has found a picture, but that was it.

Something had to be done. I prepared a simplified version of one topic, breaking it down into instructions, but even that was too hard for him and the running around the classroom continued.

Last week, desperate, I did it again, even simpler. The topic was The Black Death. I supplied the   questions, eg "Another name for the Black Death was..." There were about six questions. I told him that I'd like him to answer the questions, looking them up on line, then use the answers to produce a poster or PowerPoint with illustrations he could also find online. I had showed them to an  aide, who said that yes, it was a good simple piece that he should be able to do.

Breakthrough! He set up his table among the shelves in the library, where we were, to prevent his friends  from distracting him - I kept shooing them away for him, telling them he was there because he wanted to be -  and got to work. I did have to help him with a couple of the questions, but he was more than willing. Well before the session was over, he'd managed to produce about three quarters of  a decent PowerPoint! I suggested a couple of illustrations to go with it. He completed it next lesson.

You see, everyone wants to succeed. He's naughty because it distracts his teachers from noticing that he just can't do the work. Given a chance to succeed, he did.

And it could never have been done in the tiny classroom that class calls homeroom. The library is big enough that he could  hide from those who would stop him from succeeding. That's something else I've learned. 

I don't know if I can do it again - this is trial and error, mostly error - but I do know that I was
blissfully happy afterwards.

Year 8 Strikes Again!

What a weird week it's been so far!

Year 8A on Monday and this afternoon... It's so hard to know what to do. The two students who plagiarised did their hand written replacements without argument, though nether of them got past one paragraph on Monday. Today I sighed and told them they could start typing. Their story starts were fairly acceptable and today the girl, at least, got well past that, but I need to read it before deciding what she can do - it was the end of the day and I had to go to a staff meeting.

One student who is perfectly capable of doing more had to be made to handwrite his first draft on Monday and came up with something acceptable. I told him, too, he could type it today, but he showed me instead a new story he was typing! That, too, was acceptable if he finishes it, though I suggested e change the hero's name because he was using his own and it was not meant to be autobiographical. Whether he will complete it I don't know. What can you do with students who won't do anything outside of class time? Not everyone has a home computer, but there's always the library at lunchtime and I open three times a week. I may have to order some of these students to come in and use the computer room to finish at lunchtime. It worked last year.

I have an integration student who has done about all I'm going to get out of him - he has no classroom support and I can't persuade him to try another piece - so today I gave him a BBC vocabulary game to play while the others got on with it. I will have to come up with something else for our next activity.

There are the ones who have written thousands of words, but need to focus now on their grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.  How do you do this without having to mark every last missing comma and change of tense for them? And what do you do when, bless them, they want to write even more wen they haven't tidied up the six thousand word epic they've already done? My top student, the one who used The Hero's Journey to write a rather touching story about a boy searching for his mother, has now handed me another epic about a boy tangled up with the Taliban! I haven't read that yet, but did suggest she do a little research on the Taliban to make sure she was getting it right. Perhaps too much to ask of a Year 8 child? At her age I was writing dreadful historical novels I hadn't researched either.

And then there was the young lady who handed me some fan fiction... Well, she had written it herself, so I just suggested she make sure that readers like me, unfamiliar with the universe, could follow it.

And the boy with the gory story who decided not to kill off his hero after all and is up to chapter 3 of what's turning into a novel!

I don't know. I'm thrilled with the response from the keen students, but how much have I been able to teach them and the others? You spend so much time on discipline you can find yourself unable to sit down   with the students individually. It can be exhausting.

Tomorrow I am going to be with my history class as some do their presentations. Then we'll look at the iMovie trailers they did on Tuesday. More of that later.

Year 8 fiction - The Sequel! (From My Great Raven Blog

Well, the holidays are over and I've just finished reading the last of my student stories. They have ranged from a hundred-odd words to what has to be at least six thousand! Twelve pages of small print? Has to be.

Two of  them were plagiarised, word for word, beginning to end, from online sources and what I'm going to tell the students I have no idea. Clearly they couldn't handle the story starters I gave them last term and were desperate enough to pinch something. I'd love to just say, "Look, I don't CARE if your writing is bad! It's my job to help you fix it and I can't do that if I don't know how you write in the first place." If I thought it would do any good I'd say that. But I don't think it will. All I can do is offer them the chance to do it again, with a different writing prompt, by hand, in a single session.

There was a very short piece from a student who asked me for help for the first time this year. It sn't much, but it was what he could do. He did his best. I will give him some more short pieces to do. Perhaps start with a Cloze activity in which he chooses his own words to fill the gaps?

There was a story that used one of the prompts to have one gory murder after another, but the student really, really enjoyed the writing. He ended it abruptly with "and then he came back and killed my uncle and me. The End." but I think he just felt he had to finish. I went cross-eyed trying to edit all the punctuation-free sentences and the switching between tenses - finally I gave up and put in notes to ask him to make up his mind which tense he wanted and stick with it.

A lot were unfinished. I will get them to do a story outline before continuing.

I really must mention the two who used "The Hero's Journey." One was unfinished, but long, an account of a girl who is approached by a long-lost brother under mysterious circumstances, and broke off just as the siblings were about to escape from a murderous millionaire older sister... I have told her it's an exciting story and I'm keen to see how it ends. She used the basic elements - the call to adventure, the journey...

The six thousand word story was less obvious as Hero's Journey, but it also used the elements. The call to adventure was a young boy from a village deciding to go to the city in search of his mother, who was taken away for medical treatment by a doctor whose name he knew, but not much else, some time ago, also fulfilling a mission for a neighbour whose children have vanished into the city, and returning to his reward. It was written with a Vietnamese accent, as the young lady has only recently decided to join mainstream English classes, so it needs work yet, incuding some tightening, but she is proud of it, and so she should be.

I think the Hero's Journey is not a bad place to start students off and will consider using it again, but it's a work in progress, always needing adapting.

People keep telling me that because I'm a writer I should therefore be able to teach writing. I really don't think it's that simple.  There are a lot of people out there teaching creative writing without ever having sold anything. Then they sell a first novel and write in their bio notes that they teach it and I say, "Hang on, this is a first novel, not even a good one, and she's TEACHING this? How did she get the job?"

In my case, I know how I write, but that doesn't mean everyone does it the same way. For example,
I just start writing and worry about the quality later. But kids can't always do that, or they don't understand the concept of "first draft." I can't even show them my own work in drafts, because even my first draft is better than their finished products in most cases. I am never going to write a long, run-on sentence with no punctuation or change tenses and even person.

Guess I'll have to write something awful and let them crit it.

Beginning Narrative With Year 8

I'm a writer. I know how to write, but teaching Year 8 how to write stories? If it was that easy, everyone would be selling.

Yet it must be done. Next year they will have to do their NAPLAN test, designed by a former government to gain votes by making those lazy, good for nothing teachers accountable! And when they sit down to do their Year 9 NAPLAN test they will have to write either a persuasive essay or a "narrative"(that's a story to you and me) - not a choice but one or the other, you aren't told which. And the narrative may well be a prompt such as "The Box". And they will have 40-50 minutes to write it - heck, I'm still working on a story submission for "Cranky Ladies Of History" after months! And I'm a professional.

I did three things on Monday. One was to gather some copies of the school anthology, stories written by students and put together and edited by Chris Wheat, a wonderful teacher and YA novelist who works at my school as the English and literacy co-ordinator. Another was to print out my much simplified version of The Hero's Journey, which I did as a workshop at last year's Continuum convention, with Paul Collins. It makes a good adventure story outline. The third was to put together some links to appropriate movie trailers on YouTube

It was not a good start to the day. The interactive whiteboard room computer didn't work - someone had unplugged the important bits and I had no idea which they were or what to do. Luckily, the other Year 8 teacher had cancelled her booking for the computer room. So I took them there and gathered them around a computer. One of the students logged in and went to YouTube  for me. First, though, I told them the general story, about this ordinary guy who is visited one day by someone who tells him he's special and must go on a quest. Along the away, he makes friends and deals with a major enemy and comes back with a reward for all that trouble. I invited them to think of some stories that fitted that description. They did very well - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, Up, even a couple I hadn't thought of, such as Percy Jackson and Doctor Who!

We watched several trailers, both the ones I'd prepared and some the students had thought of. We discussed how they fitted the story outline I'd given them.

It was going very well, until I started trying to do a story together on the board. That has worked with other  classes and should have worked this time, but I suppose I was lucky that some of the worse behaved  students had lasted even that long.

I told them we were returning to our classroom, where they would do the rest by hand. My original plan was that after the story on the board they could get into groups to brainstorm, but it was not to be. They went ahead of me and I arrived to find that one of the more difficult students was being told off by a teacher whose classroom window he had broken by butting it with his head.

He was sent with a note and a reliable student to sub school while I tried to unlock my classroom. The door wouldn't open. Some students told me that this had happened when they were last there with another teacher, who had taken them to another room.

I had to find another room for them. We found one, where we read some stories from the anthology together, then individually, about all there was time to do by now. The vice principal brought back the boy who had broken the window and asked for information. Not being suicidal, the students kept silent, so he told them that they'd all do a week's lunchtime detention unless someone came to him and discussed the matter(that worked, by the way).

After all this disaster, you'd think the lesson would be a compete flop. It wasn't.

Even the difficult boys found at least one story that appealed, once I let them choose their own. One of them, mind you, was delighted to find a story with swearing in it - written, mind you, by a good student who was using it in context. One of the girls found a story that touched her and exclaimed, "Oh, how sad! Miss, do read this one."

And two other girls were so keen to write a story based on The Hero's Journey, they started immediately and took their English books home to get on with it. One is a student who, though she is lovely and works hard, has never been able to write a lot. She showed me, today, two pages of dense text about a Percy Jackson-style demigoddess who discovers she is the daughter of a fire god. On Thurday, while the others do the brainstorm, I'm going to let those two get on with their stories.

If I can get into the classroom.

Reflective Journal: Yet ANOTHER Challenge!

I met the challenge of teaching Pathways, the homeroom subject, with a wonderful practical community project that appealed to even the most difficult students, who showed what they could do and had every reason to be proud of themselves at the end of the year. Last year, our Year 8 students raised $900 between them for Save The Children!

And after the feel-good ceremony we were all called into the staff room to receive our allotments for this year and I had been taken off Pathways for the convenience of the timetable and given history/ geography, a subject I'm not qualified to teach -again for the benefit of the timetable.

No more Community Project! My colleague Jasna was also taken off it and while both teachers assigned to the subject have been supportive, I doubt either of them is interested in doing this. So we'll be back to presenting one student with the Pathways award and the subject being entirely classroom-and-theory-based and no one being able to add it to the resume they have to do in Year 9 and 10. Sigh! You know, I had one extremely difficult student last year who proved to have some leadership skills and some good ideas and rated this as his favourite subject.

But I made the best of the H/G. A colleague arranged for me to see a very good junior history teacher at her old campus to get some ideas and materials. The whole thing lasted about half an hour, after which I thanked her politely, took the stuff she had given me and took public transport back to my own campus. I got hold of the then Scope and Sequence -the document that tells you what you have to get through(though not  how - it assumes you know that)-and spent a chunk of my summer  break trying to come up with something to start with.

I prepared something I thought might be a good start, according to the document I had, and might even be engaging. And as soon as we returned, we were handed a revised scope and sequence document and there has been another since then.

Still. I have done what I can. I took them through a bit of research skill, using the topic they're about to cover, so they would have something to start, plus showing them some primary documents(another thing we have to do), such as Ibn Fadlan's description of Vikings as filthy and John of Wallingford's description of them as disgustingly clean.

  I found I also had to do mapping - what do I know about maps and mapping? I asked the campus vice- principal, who himself has to do H/G. He said, "What do I know?" and told me he had had his year 7 label and colour a world map.

I decided to do the same, except I stuck to a map of the Viking world, after a map of Scandinavia, as we're about to do the Vikings. And that told me something about the class's skills - or lack, thereof - in looking things up. I had intended to spend some time working on it with them, but when I was absent on the day I was to start, someone found my photocopied maps and handed them out to start, without discussion. So they began without me there.

Some did very well and will have their maps up immediately on the classroom wall. They got what they had to do and how to look up the countries they needed to label. Others didn't. They started the colouring in before they had done the labelling. So two or three coloured in the Mediterranean green and North Africa blue! Two put the Mediterranean in the Atlantic and one labelled the coast of North America as Algeria! I photocopied them all so I could return the originals with comments, but one student - the one who labelled Algeria in North America - refused to fix it, despite only a couple of small things needing changing. I'll keep the photocopy to show his parents if necessary, when they come for PT night, and cover the mistakes in the original with a white label, to make it easier. If he still refuses, well, all I can do is keep the mixed up one to show his Mum and Dad. His sister was in my class last year and they came for her. One boy didn't exactly do what I had asked, but worked so hard on his map that I'm putting it up anyway; he is apparently a difficult student and I want to reward his effort. He got the labels right, anyway, just didn't do it as I had asked.

Anyway, last Friday, I did an exercise using Melway's Street Directory, to give them  practice in looking up; it works pretty much the same as an atlas and is clearer. I discussed it for a while, then handed them a sheet of places in their area to look up. All they had to do was look up the map numbers in the index and write it down, then mark the spots on the photocopy I'd given them. That seemed to work better than the previous mapping we'd done, in giving them an idea how to look up. The only problem is that Melway's and atlases alike go out of date. The area didn't, of course, but the edition 35 I had at home, where I prepared it, had facilities the school's edition 32 didn't, so I had to change that bit.

The atlases are another matter. The class set is so old, it still has the Soviet Union in it! The individual copies are battered and some have had pages torn out. I am going to see if a proposal for a new class set, even ten copies to start with, will get some support.

My library is gradually starting up. I am hoping to arrange manuscript reading again this year, possibly in March, according to the publicist at Allen and Unwin. The kids love doing it and I have a new member or two in the younger classes, which is good, because I'm not sure all the Year 10s from last year are interested - some of them are doing VCE Psychology, though this didn't stop my first lot. On the other hand,some kids who had drifted away are back . I have mentioned to the English co-ordinator that I'd love to do Premier's Reading Challenge, but it's a lot of work and can't be done without staff support. I've found a new children's bookshop to do displays, since the Little Bookroom emailed to say they're not doing this any more and tried to make it sound like good news! (You can now buy online - yay! Actually, we can't. I tried to explain this and that I do this for the students, who help choose new books, to no avail. Also, that I'd been a loyal customer fr many years. No use. The only visits they will make are if you're Veryrich Grammar running a book fair). Fortunately, the Sun Bookshop in Yarraville is happy to come instead, and there's always Dymock's for the specific books.

I'm discovering the students' reading levels to help them choose the right book for them, helping the literacy bunch with advice and suggestions and working out the reading less of books they buy.

Keeping busy and trying to work out how to teach a new subject!

Literature Circles The DVD!

So, I'm sitting at home on report writing day, having done as much as I could on reports(still things to gather and marking to do anyway) and I'm working on my DVD for Literature Circles - we're going to have a showing for both classes next Friday and I must have it done and burn some copies for those kids who would like to take them home.

It's not easy. I only have one set of actual discussions - every time I tried to film a discussion at least one member of the group would raise her hands over her face and yelp, "Oh, no! Don't film me!" It's not as if I'm putting them on YouTube, I would argue - they're just for us, and for showing to teachers who want some idea of how this works. But it just didn't happen. I had one good discussion being led by Catherine, our integration aide, a multi-talented woman who is an artist and film maker (I have a film she took of the integration students building a model based on the book they had read, The Big Dig, and talking about it. Brilliant!). But for some reason, when I loaded it on to iMovie, it turned upside down, and I still haven't worked out how to right it and the one friend who could help me is in bed with stomach cramps. Even the computer technician at work said, "If you find out, let me know."

So most of the filming is of my voice interviewing the students about the books they were reading at the time and it sort of works, but I really prefer the discussions.

 Some of the students chose to do an author interview and I've arranged these with the authors, though I have only emailed one set of questions, because they really need some editing and I don't want to edit them too much or it won't be the students' questions, it will be mine. One set of questions still needs to be retrieved from our Public Share, where I hope the student who typed them has saved them. Those will go up on The Great Raven when done.

And then there were the book trailers - well, there was one quite good one based on Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons. I don't think the publishers would use it in YouTube, but it gets the message across and persuades viewers this book might be worth checking out. It was put together smoothly in Powerpoint and saving it to Quicktime gave me no problems. Likewise, the trailer for Cirque Du Freak by Darren Shan, which was produced properly by a student who knew how to use Moviemaker and could be converted to Quicktime via HandBrake. That was a good one too, though I wouldn't post it on YouTube, because the images were copyright. The music came from Jamendo, which is Creative Commons.

I had somewhat more trouble with the book trailer for Holes. It worked fine on a PC, but was missing its music when I loaded it on to my Mac. I was told by our info tech teacher that PowerPoint doesn't work with mp3(yet it worked okay with the Space Demons trailer) and he had recommended .wav, which doesn't work on a Mac. However, I found out the music he used, downloaded it as mp3 and recorded it on my computer, on which the PowerPoint opened as Keynote and Keynote does take mp3. Then I was able to save it to Quicktime and upload it to iMovie. Yay!

The one that REALLY gave me a headache was the trailer for Jenny Mounfield's The Icecream Man, a scary thriller for teens. Despite my warnings, the students produced it in Moviemaker, which should never be used by anyone who hasn't the experience and confidence to make it work. The trailer looked fine, but the file I was given by the student who put it together was not properly saved - it was a 66k wlmp file. And the student with the finished product took it with him and went off to Bangladesh for the rest of the school year!

Fortunately, he had left me a folder with the images and even the music. No text, but I got an idea - I would put it together using their images and music, in KeyNote. And they'd done me a storyboard with the planned text.

Unfortunately, I discovered that the text was plagiarised directly from the official book trailer and couldn't allow it to be used. I just couldn't! I don't know if that was the text they actually ended up using - they finished it off on the last day of Lit Circles classes and I was running around like a chicken with its head off, helping other students, asking them to save to Public share, saving files to my USB stick...

The tune was Pop Goes The Weasel - the original trailer had that, but this version was actually better than the one on the trailer, scarier - just imagine Pop Goes The Weasel sounding scary! So I took the images, placed them in order and recorded the music they had chosen. next year, when he returns, I'll ask the travelling student if he still has the original file and as long as he hasn't used the stolen text I will replace this one on the DVD. I don't think most kids understand the concept of plagiarism. They've done their research, they've found the information, what's all the fuss about? Or they tweak a few words and say, "But Miss, I've rewritten it!" (Rolls eyes).

Anyway, it seems to work not too badly, with the combination of images and music and I have placed it on iMovie along with the rest of the files. Time for a quick lunch and then put it together into a film!