Quest Story
Learning Intention:
Read a quest story and then write a quest story that includes a good and an evil character.
Success Criteria:
- Engage with a quest story.
- Understand language choices to describe a character as good or evil.
- Write a quest story.
The stimulus text: Deltora Quest: The Forests of Silence by Emily Rodda
Claire’s class were engaging with the text “Deltora Quest – The Forests of Silence”. This book was adapted into three alternative versions, including a one page summary of each book, a rhyming text, and a text with PCS symbols used to support understanding, with two or three key sentences used to summarise each chapter. We also used the anime series (episodes 1-3) to further engage with the story, an to build understanding of good and evil within the quest novel.
What did we do?
The Quest for the Magic Umbrella, by Claire Gutke.
How did we do it?
- We listened to an audio book reading of “Forests of Silence” during holiday travels. Claire loved listening to the story.
- We watched the Deltora Quest anime series (episodes 1-3) and I modelled language for Claire, with particular focus on the character names and words to describe their traits.
- I developed the adapted texts, and read each of these to Claire over a couple of weeks.
- A topic page about story and characters was added to Claire’s PODD on Tobii and iPad.
- The character names in her PODD were printed, and the anime series was watched again. The characters were sorted into columns, headed with the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ symbols.
– Alongside the book study, we watched lots of Disney films with clear good and evil character depictions and focussed on describing the characters as we watched. We discussed the colours, feelings, music choices. - Claire engaged in multiple readings of the simplified text, alongside listening to her teacher read the novel to the class.
- Over multiple lessons across the term, Claire added to the concept map plan for her own quest story.
– The ways that Claire contributed to the plan were noted on the concept map.
– Multimodal methods of communication were used to select vocabulary and to share ideas.
– Her alternative pencil was used to make some letter selections. - When all elements of the concept map had been completed, I used the information to model sentence writing including the information. Each sentence was checked with Claire, and there were some she disagreed to, so alternative options were given. The sentences were illustrated using Boardmaker Online, and the same process was used to have Claire to agree to the images selected for each sentence. Claire was really excited during this part of the process.
- The final story was also documented with annotations, showing how Claire made her own selections, what was suggested that she agreed to, and additional text that was included to help support intelligibility of the final product for an audience.
- The finished story was loaded onto Claire’s eye gaze device in Communicator 5, so that she could independently read it. A published version was printed through Snapfish, and sent to school so that Claire’s peers could read this to and with her. It was a hit. Claire is very proud of this story, and rightly so!
What worked well?
- Knowing the text well in advance of the class book study.
- Access to multiple representations of the Deltora book.
- Access to multiple representations of good and evil.
- The concept map allowed small parts of the text to be considered within sessions over a longer period of time and gave access to easy review of the information that had been gathered.
- A choice of ways to contribute, where all modes were valued.
- Publishing the book with Snapfish really added value.