Posted on: 20/05/2014
We were recently asked to develop a poetry text-based teaching sequence for years 3 and 4 and were drawn towards using a text that may have gone unnoticed under various Literacy strategies and frameworks of the past. It’s a book that has been floating around The Literacy Tree house for some time and has been waiting for its moment – and this is it. The text is Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion by Hilaire Belloc. Why might we have ignored its presence in the past? A read of some of the units many of us were once expected to cover, particularly those linked to poetry, were either so specific they left us feeling stifled, or so general we had no idea what they were actually asking us to teach: units such as exploring form and creating images spring to mind, and we would probably not have considered using Jim to exemplify one of the narrative units.
So, back to Jim. A few years ago, the celebrated author and illustrator, Mini Grey, winner of the Kate Greenaway in 2007 for The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon, decided to revive what was, for some, a forgotten genre: The Cautionary Tale. She cast new eyes over a classic story and illustrated it in such a way as to create images that engage and excite young readers as well as paper engineering that creates points of specific interest (I have witnessed children being lost in the map of the zoo for several hours at a time as well as almost jump out of their skin when the lion literally jumps out of the page at them). Wanting to create some text-based teaching sequences from scratch that were aligned with the expectations from the new National Curriculum, we leapt at the chance of using a text we had not planned from before and cautionary tales were a perfect context for meeting many of those expectations. We knew it was important to identify genres not previously explored and identify written outcomes that could result from the text. Alongside this, poetry is an integral part of the teaching sequences we develop. Whilst not the kind of ‘classic’ that those in charge of writing the curriculum may have had in mind when penning the curriculum, Hilaire Belloc’s work must surely fall within the canon of great children’s Literature.
Beyond being a classic and a form previously unexplored, when teaching poetry (particularly rhyme!) it is beneficial to have a strong character and a narrative that children can hook into, and which supports prediction and inference through text – cautionary verse does all of this at once. Cautionary tales by their very nature tell simple and strong narratives. They are gruesome enough to engage and contain a moral twist, perfect for identifying simple themes or messages.
One hurdle we faced when developing a sequence where children would ultimately write their own tales in verse, was that Hilaire Belloc chose to write in rhyming couplets. In his verse, this adds a sense of pace, as well as promoting prediction (the positioning of key words and clause order is essential to the way we read his texts: “The Lion having reached his Head, The Miserable Boy was dead!”) but we knew from experience that children will often pair incongruous words that were matched for their rhyme rather than their appropriateness! However, Belloc’s rhymes are often fun and have a sense of the ridiculous, which is great for children writing their own rhyming couplets and creating a narrative structure supports children to produce couplets that make sense and are not chosen tenuously.
Of course, Belloc was not the only author of the cautionary tale (despite perhaps being the most well-known). These tales are ingrained in the folklore of most cultures and are closely related to the sorts of moral messages taught in fairy tales, nursery rhymes, fables and urban legends – Grimm tales are called ‘grim’ for a reason! Often passed down as part of an oral tradition, most have evolved to suit generations and the cultures between which they have been passed. Their audience is not restricted to the very young – often being written for young adults and adolescents (horror films owe an awful lot to the ‘urban legend’).
However, this is a genre that has continued to evolve and children’s authors of the last century have chosen to pen tales to suit a new generation of readers. David Lucas and Jeanne Willis, to name but two have created tales to enthrall younger readers with less gruesome outcomes, while authors such as Edward Gorey’s hauntingly illustrated tales provide a much darker context for these stories to be told. Belloc’s verse cleverly seems to inhabit the middle ground in this genre, the characters meeting perfectly grisly ends, yet told in such a way that the reader is left revelling in Belloc’s perfect sense of the absurd.
To find out some of the tales we like the most, read our list of Cautionary Tales
To look at an approach to using Cautionary Tales in the classroom, look at our Cautionary Tales Project Text-Based Teaching Sequence.
