Portfolio Week 4 - A reading experience

Yesterday I had a relief shift in the 3-5 room at my centre. One of the intentional teaching experiences I had was reading a story to a handful of children, Dinosaurs' Day Out by Nick Sharratt. The book is designed to give children an introduction to map reading skills, something I had been thinking about since it was mentioned in an earlier seminar.

The book introduces the map early and shows (via big green dinosaur hands) the origin and desired destination of the two anthropomorphic dinosaurs. The children varied in age and engagement level, and some had some cellophane from the craft table and were happy enough to watch the story through the cellophane without interacting much.

Others however, like Adam and Maria (names changed) had read the book before and were highly engaged. What I felt the book did well was to highlight a number of symbols, not only seen on maps and roads, but also those that might be encountered on a road trip, like at a service station. Adam and Maria were very keen to share their knowledge of which symbols they could already recognise, which were the vast majority of them.

So, given that they were already competent in their symbol knowledge, I tried to extend this by finding difficult ones. At the service station, there was a petrol tanker with three signs on it. “Danger”, a skull and crossbones logo, and a fire (flammable) logo. Adam had little trouble with ‘crossbones’, but the fire was just ‘fire!’. ‘So’, I asked ‘Who knows what flammable means?’. This led to an interesting discussion about the flammability of fuel, and why nobody can smoke at a petrol station. On reflection, if I could do it again I would have emphasised the letters in ‘Danger’ also, which I missed as we pursued the other avenues.

Later, the dinosaurs passed a forest with more signs. This time, there was a ‘No campfires’ sign, highlighted by a fire logo with a red strikethrough. Seizing the opportunity, I tested them again. Again, the answer was ‘Fire!’. By this time, Harry had wandered over and joined us. When I said that the sign meant ‘No fires’, and asked why that might be, Harry jumped in quickly: “Because the trees might all catch on fire, and then the animals would get burnt”. The others agreed, nodding sagely.

All in all I found that the book was useful for prompting discussions like these. The central premise of teaching map usage I found to be quite awkward, as to do this you would have to turn back to the start of the book each time it asks a question about the directions. In a one-on-one situation with a 5 year old, I think this would probably be fine, but with a larger mixed group, I was more concerned with keeping them engaged and extending their learning.

I felt as though this session went well. However, I would welcome peers comments about how else I might have gone about things, and particularly, if there is other numeracy or literacy learning in books like these that I’ve neglected to mention.