Where the Wild Things Are: Part II

By heather on March 30, 2009

So I recited the book and showed the movie trailer to the students on my Interactive Whiteboard, just as I mused about in my last post.  From there, I read an old version of the “Three Little Pigs” and asked my students to formulate questions or plot points to fill in the gaps in character development, narrative, background, etc, muck like what Spike Jonze seems to have done in his adaptation.  

So I want to share some of the awesome questions my 7th graders developed to help them fill in the story gaps:

1.     If the mother pig didn’t have the “means” to have so many kids, why did she have three?             

2.     Why did the three pigs go their separate ways?  How was their relationship if they wouldn’t stay together?

3.     Why did the men so willingly give their stuff to the pigs?  What did they get in return?

4.     Did the final pig mourn his brothers? If not, why?

5.     Where’s the daddy pig?

6.     Where did the pig get the money for the butter churn, or was that donated to him freely like the bricks and other items?  

So, now you can see where this lesson of narratives and inferencing can go.  I can have a table group focus on developing one question as a means to jigsaw the writing in the class.  Or, I can have each student zoom in on a question to focus on one element to expand upon. Or, well, the follow-ups are endless.

It was a fun day of listening to them develop questions that proved their brains were on 10.  As Sheridan Blau says, “Honor confusion.”