Children's literature series - The bear, the piano, the dog and the fiddle

The bear, the piano, the dog and the fiddle

by David Litchfield

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In The bear and the piano (TBATP), Bear is the star of the show. However, in The bear, the piano, the dog and the fiddle (TBTPTDATF), Bear becomes a supporting character, whilst ageing fiddle player Hector and his dog Hugo are the main characters.

Hector gives up playing the fiddle after a piano-playing bear creates headlines and his act becomes yesterday's news. Unbeknownst to him, his dog Hugo picks up the fiddle while he's feeling sorry for himself and teaches himself to play. One night Hector wakes to discover Hugo practicing on the roof. Hector is impressed and passes on his expertise so that Hugo can continue to improve. Soon crowds of people come to watch Hugo play, including the famous piano-playing bear himself, who invites him to join his band. Hector encourages Hugo to join Bear but as reality sets in that his friend will be leaving him, he begins to feel jealous. When Hugo leaves to join Bear's band, he departs on bad terms. Immediately, feelings of regret set in for Hector. What will become of their friendship? How will Hector manage without his dear friend Hugo?

Discussions, teachable moments and tasks within the classroom

Quality children's literature can be used for a range of purposes. In my classroom this year, we read TBATP as a companion text for a teaching and learning (T&L) cycle on literary descriptions of characters. After that, we used TBTPTDATF as a companion for a T&L cycle on narrative writing. Most recently, our T&L cycle focused on taking perspectives of characters through whom the story is not told. This was a great opportunity to revisit both these texts for a different purpose. What we tried to do was view the two stories as one complete story and think about the different characters' perspectives. This led to the obvious questions, 'What were Hector and Hugo doing during the time that Bear was learning to play the piano?' and 'What was Bear doing during the time that Hector gave up playing the fiddle and Hugo took up playing the fiddle?'.

Sequencing for comprehension

When revisiting both these texts, we just needed to do a refresher on the sequences of events. In our class, we simply did two quick talking and listening activities for students to sort the events from the stories in the correct order. TODO - scan, print and cut sets of images from both texts for the sorting activity.

We then plotted these events on butcher's paper with four quadrants (much like a cartesian plane), with the top-left quadrant showing the sequenced events from TBATP and the bottom-right showing the events from TBTPTDATF. The bottom-left and top-right quadrants were left blank to be filled in later with the events that could have happened involving bear in the second story and Hector and Hugo in the first story.

Looking for clues and inferring

The culminating task in this T&L cycle was to create an interview with one of the characters from either story. This requires students to make inferences based on their understandings of the characters from the two stories taken as a whole.

In TBTPTDATF, there are some windows in to the past of Hector and Hugo - 'Over the years, they’d had good times, bad times and even some crazy times.'. This leads to the obvious question - 'What were the good times, bad times and crazy times like for Hector and Hugo?'. That Hector tells Hugo 'My act is yesterday's news' suggests he had had some success as a fiddle player in the past. Finally, when Hector gives up playing and spends most of his time at home watching TV, there are pictures on the wall behind him of some of the better days - he's seen performing on stage for an act called 'Hector and the merry men' and also 'Hector the heroic'. This allows students the chance to use their imagination and start to piece together their version of events for Hector and Hugo's story whilst the series of events for TBATP were playing out.

Questioning

Posing these questions to students is a good opportunity to explicitly teach students about different types of questions.
Teach - Open-ended ('thick') questions usually begin with why or how, whereas questions that can be answered with one or two words or yes/no are 'thin' questions - they might begin with what, how many, when, can, do. We want to ask 'thick' questions of our characters.
Task - Students write questions for Bear with the intention of gathering information for the top-right quadrant and questions for Hector and Hugo for the bottom-right quadrant.
Ideally, the questions for the different characters would be written on separate days, with the 'Getting in to role' activity that follows to be done following the questioning before moving on to the next character.

Getting in to role

Teach - An important part of getting in to role is understanding first-person. If students are wanting to know the answer to questions like 'Why did Bear go back to the city after returning to the forest?' (at the end of TBATP), teach them that because we are stepping into the roles of the characters ourselves, we need to address Bear himself with this question. When addressing Bear directly, the question would read 'Why did you go back ...?'. Similarly when answering, this should be answered with something like 'I decided to go back because ...'.
Task - Students get in to the roles of Bear, Hector or Hugo by answering the questions that they previously wrote. TODO - Type the 'thick' questions students wrote previously and print them so they can choose a selection with which to practice. TODO - Modelling what this looks like for students is necessary to elicit quality responses from the students.
Discuss - After students practice several questions in pairs, this can be practiced as a whole class in the form of a 'hot-seat' activity:

1. Teacher nominates two students to share the role of a character.
2. The rest of the class are given questions (depending on how many questions there are, this can be one question per student or one between two).
3. Characters take turns to answer the students' questions.
4. Teacher can give feedback and add on ideas to the responses.

Some of these answers can used as ideas to complete the top-right and bottom-left quadrants that were left blank from the sequencing task.

TASK - create an interview

After multiple opportunities to practice questioning and answering in role, students create an interview (either recorded or performed in front of the class), taking on the roles of one of these characters and the interviewer. This can also lead to a writing task of an interview script.
Teach - If the interview leads to a written transcript discuss the differences between spoken-like and written-like language. Pre-prepared models will allow you to demonstrate these more clearly.

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