Reflective diary 2 - Amanda

21stOctober 2008

Reflective Diary

Book reading

I really enjoyed listening to the array of extracts from our favourite children’s literature that we read to each other at the beginning of the lesson and liked the idea of having to read in front of each other to build our confidence and prepare us for teaching. It was interesting to reflect upon our personal choices and discuss issues such as how the books could be used and who they would be suitable for.

Visual texts

Drawing a picture with shapes and having to answer “yes” or “no” to questions regarding the position of the shapes on the paper.

I was in a group with Kay and Pratiksha and volunteered myself to draw the picture. I arranged the shapes to make a smiley face and I thought this would be fairly easy as there were two people guessing and only one picture to draw, but it took a lot of questioning on their part for them to get close to what I had wanted them to draw!

Drawing a picture and describing it to the others for them to copy

Kay spent a while drawing her picture and I thought it was going to take her forever to describe it to us accurately but her descriptions were very clear and it didn’t take us too long to produce something similar to what she had imagined.

Informing the group of what could be seen on the screen

Pratiksha told us what she could see in each of the slides and I could imagine what was on the screen quite easily. Despite this, they didn’t seem to link together or make a lot of sense without being able to look at the screen as we weren’t told that the mouse was actually inside a book.

Telling the story of “The Little Mouse Trapped in a Book”

Kay and I told the story of “The Little Mouse Trapped in a Book” between us. It helped to know what was going to come and we didn’t have too much difficulty telling the story to Pratiksha except for the fact that we weren’t sure how long each slide was going to stay on the screen for. It was enjoyable using the slides to tell a story as we tried to use our imaginations to make the story sound exciting by being descriptive and involving humour.

My personal opinion about visual texts is that I think some well-drawn pictures add to a book and a child will always be interested in looking at colourful pictures especially before they can read. However, I believe that the imagination is stimulated more if some things are not available in pictures and a good writer should not need to rely on pictures to get his message across. It is not important for everyone to have exactly the same image in their mind for a description to be effective.