For the love of books: The Arrival
There are several reasons why I started writing the #fortheloveofbooks blog. One of them is quite simply the fact that over my teaching career I have really developed a love for books. It’s not something that I’ve always had. I remember as a child, I wasn’t particularly interested in reading at all. As I became a young teenager, I began to be more interested, but largely only in the things that I liked – mostly historical fiction loosely based on some real historical events (I was a big fan of Bernard Cornwell, who wrote The Last Kingdom series).
My other reason for writing this blog is that I’m always seeing tweets and posts about the latest books that are coming out (which I love seeing by the way), but I want to help teachers when it comes to books that have been around for a while so that they are not forgotten. I wrote about Marcia Williams’ books in my first blog on my website, as they are books that have been around for a long time, but I rarely see other teacher’s using them. I want to try and balance out the new ‘shiny’ books with ‘the older but proven to be fantastic already’ books. I think both areas are hugely important, and whilst embracing wonderful new authors and books, we can’t forget about many of the existing books out there.
So today, I’m focussing on a book by Shaun Tan. It is one that I’ve used many times as a class teacher, both for inspiring storytelling and writing, but also for learning in art and design. It was first published in 2006 and yes, it’s another picture book. Visuals are so important to me as part of storytelling, developing an understanding and developing and using new vocabulary. The artwork in ‘The Arrival’ is absolutely stunning, provoking all kinds of thoughts and emotions, and it is just one of Shaun Tan’s many amazing works.
The Plot - Developing children’s imagination
The beauty of this amazing picture book is that so much of it’s story is open to interpretation. Yes you can use it for developing retrieval skills in terms of what is physically on the page, but in terms of developing inference skills and the idea of ‘reading between the lines’, it’s impossible to look at this book without forming your own sense of what may or may not be going on. For that reason, it is difficult to talk about ‘the plot’ as such, which is exactly why I wanted to start by focussing on it. Yes, as you go through the book, there is this thread of a man, who leaving his family behind, goes on a journey. He goes through some form of processing as he arrives in a new city or country and then experiences all sorts of wonderful and terrible things as he continues on. But it’s the reader who has the opportunity to add detail to the plot. It’s the reader who can start to imaging what exactly is going on. As an adult reading this book, there are multiple possibilities and ways of interpreting the way this book unfolds. As children and learners in the classroom, it’s a great way to encourage thoughtfulness around plot development and imagination in terms of the finer details.
It's really important to provide children with brilliant models for writing, but models can come in different forms. Using picture books like The Arrival are great models of storytelling in a completely different way. They provide scaffolds for children who can select and order the different images in the way that they perceive and create a story from that. I’ve often used the opening page as a way of encouraging children to consider what the story might be about and make their own predictions. It’s a page that has nine images and there are so many ideas that have been presented to me regarding these images that I had never considered. Even ideas about how the teapot had obtained the crack down the side. We have to give children the opportunity to stretch and develop their imagination within storytelling, supporting them with vocabulary development but also not being afraid to come up with ideas that aren’t considered ‘the norm’ whatever that may mean these days. The Arrival, and of course many other works by Shaun Tan, are brilliant for this purpose.
Exploring diversity
What I think Shaun Tan also does brilliantly through his storytelling, is open up a whole discussion about diversity. On the inside cover of the book, there are sixty images of different individuals who all look unique. I haven’t worked out whether they are all in the story itself - that could be a good challenge for my daughters during half term actually – but it gives you a taste of what some aspects of this book may be about before you have even started reading it. There are people who are all from different places, worlds and cultures, and as the main character goes through the book, he encounters at least some of these different people and experiences these different things. As I said earlier, there are lots of positive and negative experiences throughout the story, and I think at least some of these things could be linked to diversity and the challenges faced by people who seem ‘different’ to each other. It’s an important conversation ton have with our children as they start to grow up, and I think Tan does a great job of presenting this at different points in the story in order to provoke powerful and meaningful discussions around those challenges.
Cross curricular art learning
Another obvious use for The Arrival in the classroom is through art. I recently worked on a unit with some Year 4 children who were learning about storytelling through art, and The Arrival is a perfect book for this. Firstly, we explored the opening pages and what the story being told could be about. Then we focussed on the details of Shaun Tan’s art work. We looked at the sepia colouring and how we could recreate that or do something similar using charcoal as a medium. We looked at the shapes and drawing styles that he uses and in particular looked at the use of shadows to present some of the ’monsters’ of the story in the early pages – there are some amazing images of tentacles over the buildings in the town suggesting some sort of evil or danger is looming over the characters in the story.
The children then had to apply this learning by telling their own story through pictures, first creating a scene from a well known fairy tale but with a twist. Using charcoal, they created some amazing images that start to tell the story. Here’s an example where the tag line is ‘The tale of the little billy goats cows gruff’.
Ultimately, as you already know, I think picture books are a fantastic resource that are invaluable to teaching in primary schools. The Arrival is a great example of this, and I’m thankful for the talents of Shaun Tan as he has created something that no one else could have created. It’s a fantastic book with a story that leaves so much to the imagination in terms of retelling it, and if you haven’t used it before, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy.