Critical Reading in Everyday Life

Please look at this website on an online story, with animation and narration on the Little Red Riding Hood, a story that we are all so familiar with.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-red-riding-hood.htm

Coding
The text is accompanied by animation and audio narration. Based on the audio narration and the text, there is an aim to help children make phoneme and word recognition. In addition, there is also reading from left-to-right directionality. This is probably to teach children literacy skills.

Semantic
The role of this text participant is to follow the words as the narrator reads. Fairy tales is probably one of the first genres of text that children are in contact with at a young age. The idea of reading fairy tales is to expose children to stories and non-fiction texts. I would suggest that this text be catered to children aged around 4 who are learning to read. They would most probably have already heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood. By using a familiar text, children can just follow the narration and pictures to help decode words. It may even be possible that the writer is trying to introduce adjectives as we can see from the usage of “nice cake”, “big ears”, “big eyes” and “loud scream”.

Pragmatic
Fairy tales is a non-fiction text, falling under the text type category of narratives. One of the first few text types that are taught in school is writing a narrative. By exposing children to such stories, the concept of narratives is being internalized and hopefully children will be able to apply it when they have started writing.

Critical Competence
Mention the title, “Little Red Riding Hood” to any child and ask the child the gender of the little red riding hood. Chances are, the child would say that it is a female. In my opinion, the child is unconsciously cognitively thinking of the words “little” and “red” which would tend to be associated with girls, rather than boys. Looking at the pictures, the woodcutter is a male. A woodcutter, the hero who saves the day, does manual work and requires strength to chop the trees. Therefore, typically, a male would be more suitable for such a masculine role. The villain although is a wolf in this story, the voice that is given to the wolf is clearly a male’s voice.
On the other hand, Little Red Riding Hood is placed in the position whereby she listens to her mother to deliver the basket of food over. She is portrayed as being obedient, expected from daughters. She then meets the wolf and does not suspect anything amiss when she observed that her grandmother did not look like her grandmother! Instead, she asked questions. In this way, again, females are portrayed as being gullible. Little Red Riding Hood’s mother was also clothed in apron, depicting that mothers are homemakers. Finally, the clothes worn by the woodcutter is blue, whereas the grandmother is in pink. This is again a stereotypical expectation that blue is for males and pink for females.

Critical reading skills in Secondary 2
In this scenario, I will not use this source for critical reading skills. I would select the Little Red Riding Hood text, fully written and ask students to draw the characters. I would then ask them the following questions.
· Why did you choose these colours?
· Why did you choose to draw the clothes in this manner?
· Is it possible that the woodcutter is female?
· Would it change your impression of the story if the roles are reversed – the females are the woodcutter and wolf, while the males are the grandmother, little red riding hood and her father.

Digital Technology in Schools

Technology has definitely changed the way we live – work, school, communication, shopping, food and almost any other thing you can think of. To put it bluntly, if we were to take technology out of our lives, I am sure many of us will feel handicapped in more ways than one. I realized the importance of technology as I am currently teaching at the CDAC centre. As a small tuition centre set up, the only 2 resources that I have are the whiteboard and worksheets. There is no visualizer or OHP. As such, I always find it very inefficient as I would need some time to write the questions on the whiteboard. If I had a computer and a projector, I would be able to prepare the questions on PowerPoint and make use of the animation to enhance my teaching. I could also make use of websites, videos, clips, music, simulations and other resources to show a concept in various ways.

With the concept of multiple intelligences, these concepts are very important as it caters to the various multiple intelligences that students have. Teaching in the Singapore classroom is no longer confined to chalk and talk. Some students are visual learners, while some are linguistic learners. With the usage of technology, in a single lesson, it can be planned to cater to suit the diversity of learners. Looking at the English syllabus for 2010, new components have been added in such as viewing and representing. There is a need to revise the syllabus due to the ever changing world, which is what we want to prepare our students for.

Movie Posters!

I have selected some movie posters and classified them into 3 main categories – action, the supernatural and romance.



In the first set, the four movies:
1. Die Hard
2. The Mummy
3. Resident Evil
4. Indiana Jones

I would classify these movies under “action”. The general colour theme is brown. Based on the colour theme brown, one could almost predict that the genre is of an action film. My hypothesis is that brown gives people the impression of mud and maybe the countryside. Therefore, it hints that there will be a lot of adventure, seeming to suggest action.



In this second set, the four movies are:
1. Bless the Child
2. The Ring
3. Shutter
4. The Exorcist

These movies fall under the category of “the supernatural”. General the colour theme is black or if not, is rather dark. Based on the colour theme, one would also be able to predict that the story is highly likely to be a horror film. Just like the prince of darkness, the supernatural is the dark side of life, therefore, the colour, black.



In this third set, the four movies are:
1. Bridget Jones Diary
2. Maid in Manhattan
3. Bride Wars
4. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Needless to say, these shows would be classified under “romance”. Opposite from the supernatural, the colours used in these posters are light colours, mainly white, pink and yellow. Love and marriage is looked upon as something divine. A new life, a new beginning. Hope. Therefore, the usage of light colours to signify hope.

Apart from the title and based on the colour theme of these posters, one would be able to guess what the story would be about.