For the love of books: Marcia Williams
From early on as an NQT, I quickly realised how important books were to my teaching. People often talk about having a hook as the starter for a lesson or a topic, and if you find the right book (or books in this case) then you will be on to a winner with the children for sure. One of the best ways of developing a love of reading is to model that love for reading yourself as a teacher. The books that have always worked best are those which the children can relate to or evoke some form of emotion. Sometimes it’s a book that you wouldn’t expect. Something silly that doesn’t particularly have ground-breaking vocabulary but makes your class laugh. An example of this is a book called ‘The Strange Case of Origami Yoda’ by Tom Angleburger. It mentions the word ‘butt’ a few times amongst other things, but my Year 5 class loved it at the end of the summer term. Other books like those by Michael Morpurgo give children the chance to put themselves into the story more and relate to the emotions of the characters. Sometimes the children are just really interested in a specific topic, and reading a book like ‘Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief’ whilst learning about the Ancient Greeks just adds to the experience when discovering more about Ancient Greek mythology. No matter the book, if it encourages a love of reading then it can only benefit the children that are experiencing it. Everyone has an opinion about which books are good and which are not. Everyone is right if their opinions have the children’s best interests at heart. And so I’m hoping this will be the first blog post in a series of blog posts, simply expressing my opinion on the books I love or have used in the classroom.
So why am I starting my first official blog post about books by focussing on Marcia Williams? To be quite honest, I fell in love with them at the start of my teaching career fourteen years ago. I remember a consultant coming into school to work on our curriculum and having a discussion with her about the books I was using. She noticed that I had a thing for Marcia’s books before I even realised. We shared many conversations about how I could use them in lessons and things I had already done that were inspired by them. Put simply, I think they are brilliant. And here’s why:
Firstly, lots of them cover a range of different myths, legends and folklore around different historical topics. History is a subject that I love. Whether the retelling of Greek mythology in ‘The Iliad and the Odyssey’, the legend of ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’ or bringing ‘Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ to life for children, I have been continuously engaged by the way Marcia Williams expresses these stories.
Titles by Marcia Williams
Her style is brilliant, largely comic strip in nature, and this has really appealed to me throughout my time as a primary school teacher. Picture books are some of my favourite books because of what you can do with them in a lesson to develop and inspire children’s own creativity and innovation in oracy and writing. Marcia makes this easy. As an example, I would often use specific images from one of her retellings and ask the children to first order them chronologically after listening to the story. This gives them the opportunity to consolidate what they know in terms of the key events. Then, and if you have used Marcia’s books at all you will know, the images are funny and engaging (occasionally bordering on a little rude) and the children really love having discussions around them. Then comes vocabulary development. The vocabulary that the children can come up with just from looking at a picture will amaze you. And of course this needs to be continuously developed and they need to be exposed to language in order to acquire it better. But the power of Marcia’s fun and engaging imagery really has promoted the children’s creativity when developing language and ideas for writing!
I love the storytelling, and putting stories from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Shakespeare into a fun and comical format which allows children to access them is an incredible feat. They are daring and use imagery that other authors and illustrators might shy away from – a highlight being in the Miller’s Tale where Nicholas asks Alison for a kiss, to which she sticks her bottom out of the window instead! Of course we have to think about our audience. I wouldn’t use these stories in Year 1 for example. But for a mature Year 5 or 6 class they can evoke reactions and discussions that promote an increasing love of reading. As educators, this is invaluable as we all know how important reading is for children to develop as learners and as people.
Example page from ‘Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ by Marcia Williams
If you have read any of Marcia Williams’ stories to your class, I’d love to talk more about how they received them. And if you haven’t, I’d highly recommend doing so and seeing how the children react whilst discussing the imaginative and creative retelling of age-old stories.