Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Day Two - What is a book?

We've just finished Day Two here. Yesterday was about looking at self-portraits and drawing yourself. Today is about books and writing about yourselves. Here's what we are learning today:
* Think about what makes a book
* Think about how form (how the book is put together) and content (what the book is about) work together
* Compare different types of writing: fiction, poetry, letter, newspaper, magazine, factual, blog etc.
* Think about differences in style, tone and audience when planning your own writing

We started by listing all the different types of writing that we could think of from fact to fiction and decided that the important thing when planning to write is to know who you are writing for. We also talked about how a letter to a business person would be different to writing to a friend; how a newspaper article is to give facts quickly and might be thrown away afterwards but a magazine might be more image based and be kept longer. Poems usually rhyme and have shorter lines than prose, and the form (layout on page) might be important. Books for toddlers, Maria pointed out, would need to have short sentences and lots of pictures, while teenagers would prefer novels with lots of text.

After this we looked a lots of different books around the house to see how they are put together. We talked about how all dictionaries are structured in the same way, and imagined what would happen if they were just written as words came to mind! We examined a book about an Egyptian Mummy which has a plastic mummy case in the middle which shows you more with each page turn and we looked at the Life on a Famine Ship pop-up book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and a few others before watching this video clip that I made for the pilot project:

An important part of the pilot project in the classroom was the journal, which were used to explore techniques, draw, paint, sketch, write notes, develop ideas, collect interesting images, photos, textures, materials, fabric scraps and methods of working over the course of the project. They're meant to be a safe place to record mistakes as well as successes and jot down ideas that come to you in the middle of the night. We got ours today, we are using A5 sketchpads, but anything that can be used to keep thoughts and ideas together would work, from an old shoebox to a portfolio case, or laptop. Again as the project is more about the process than the content they don't need to be neat and tidy, use whatever methods of recording you prefer, visual, written or audio.

The prompts I had for writing about yourself today were a letter to your past or future self, a newspaper report on some event in your life or a poem about an aspect of yourself. Feel free to do as many or as few as you like. Maria decided to do a fact file on herself and our cats instead and I've still to do mine.

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