My Brother, My Sister and Me - by Susan Price

Susan Price

     Here we are again. Have a look at this. It takes you to another of those interactive e-books.

http://stories4learning.com/susan/siblings/

     This is one I put together for the RLF Consultancy Training Course I've been taking. I had ten minutes to give 'a presentation' or 'mini-workshop' on a subject of my choice. It had to have 'interactive exercises.'
           Ten minutes!
          Since I met so many students whose eyes became glazed with terror at the mere mention of apostrophes, I invented a 'story' that deliberately used the apostrophe several times.

                           I borrowed my sister's best dress.

I didn't see the chocolate bar on the bus seat.

I sat on it.

There was melted chocolate all down the back of my sister's dress.

I didn't tell her.

I just hung it back in her wardrobe.

It wasn't my fault!

     The pictures come from Wikimedia Commons. You copy their location into the Stories4Learning programme and it appears on the page of the 'book.' Amazingly, they didn't have a picture of a melting chocolate bar - so I had to make do with what looks like a chocolate fondant.

I borrowed my brother's smart-phone.

He didn't know.

I dropped it in a fountain.

I didn't tell him.

I just put it back in his pocket.

He wonders why it's lost all its smarts.

I'm sorry, really!

         I tried to write a passage that was amusing, and didn't talk down to anyone. You can see that, besides giving practice in things like 'didn't' and 'wasn't', the text features the fearful 'it's' and 'its', as well as abbreviations like 'I'm.'

       Here's the link again - http://stories4learning.com/susan/siblings/

       Click on the red and green bricks on the tool bar. You'll see that some of the text is underlined in red, and some in green. (Since I posted this, Alan has made the page less cluttered by tidying the tool bar away. So, to find these red and green bricks, click on the little coloured gear-wheels in the top left-hand corner.)

        All the possessive apostrophes fall into the red blocks - because they're always associated with 'Who or What' words. That is, Who or What the sentence is about.  The thing or person owned is tied to its owner by that possessive apostrophe.

     It could be: The child's mother or the dog's paw, but it's always going to be Who or What.

         Some of the apostrophes fall into the green blocks - because they are 'Doing or Being' words that have been shortened, and the apostrophe marks the missing letter.
         Then we have - 'He wonders why it's lost all its smarts.'
          And, 'I'm sorry.'
         'It's' and 'its' are differentiated by colour - and it's clear that 'I'm' is made up of a pronoun, 'I' and a shortened verb, 'am.' Visual clues like these are a great aid to memory. (For those with red-green colour blindness, the green words go into italic when you click on the bricks.)
         (Those of you wondering why 'why' is blue - it's because 'why' is a 'When, Where, How' word, and they're coded blue.)
        Click on the 'hot potato' brick in the toolbar - it's the black brick to the left of the white ones. This puts a row of 'hot potatoes' against each sentence. Click on the third one alongside 'He wonders why it's lost all its smarts,' and you get a puzzle where all the words are cut into bits and jumbled. Drag them back into position, and you get practice in using 'its' and 'it's.'
         Ironically, where I tried to teach many English students how to use the apostrophe, my cousin, in Switzerland, is trying to unteach the apostrophe to his German students. It isn't used in German - but they're picking it up from the Mcdonalds' ad, 'I'm lovin' it.' Another reason to hate Mcdonalds, as if I needed any more.
 

The brother's smart-phone

     Oh, and by the way - click on the little playback button at the end of those hot-potato sentences, and you'll hear the sentence spoken aloud  - another little repetition to help those learning a foreign language. 
 
      I can't say that I covered myself in glory when I did the presentation. I was up first, always unnerving, and there were - inevitably - computer problems. I was so conscious of time flitting past that I skipped things - and then found that I had time in hand which I didn't know what to do with.
         Feedback said that I shouldn't have spent so much time explaining how the S4L system worked, and should have concentrated on apostrophes and covered them more thoroughly - which my own shrewd Davy had said, at home, and I ignored him, as I so often do. ("You will not be told, Suzzie!")

        (I should make it clear that the RLF, as an old and well respected charity, do not endorse, or support, or in any way associate themselves with S4L. They do not support any teaching method in particular.)

      Now what? - Well now, instead of writing, I am planning and preparing workshops for the work-experience section of my training. It's not something I've really done before. Talks, yes - lots of talks. But workshops, as one of my training mentors said, 'are a very different breed of beast.' At the moment I'm preparing a sort of dry-run workshop on 'How To Construct A Scary Story', using 'Mr. Fox' as an example. I've been watching YouTube vids on how to use Powerpoint.

      If I can manage that, I'm then looking at designing the real thing - a workshop for 6th form students on how to write a good essay, covering title deconstruction, essay construction, language and anything else you can think of.
       Please wish me luck! 

Susan Price won the Carnegie Medal for her book, The Ghost Drum, and the Guardian Award for The Sterkarm Handshake.

She was an RLF Fellow, based in De Montfort University, for three years.

Her website can be found at http://www.susanpriceauthor.com/