A Story Like the Wind / Before Reading / Hook /
What Connects Us?
A hook to encourage enquiry and foreground children's knowledge
Lesson from A Story Like the Wind series
Text potential
- Background knowledge: Refugee experience
Strategies used
- Immersive Hook
Purpose
Children will come to A Story Like the Wind with a wide range of experience and knowledge. Some will have been personally affected by the issues raised. Others will know only what they have seen second hand on television or been exposed to in school. For some, it will be a very remote experience. This hook is designed to provoke children to thought and is best carried out at a week before you intend to start working with the story. It will provide you with an excellent assessment opportunity foregrounding children’s knowledge and attitudes, which you can then work from as you carry out this sequence of learning.
Preparation
- ‘A display of photographs of refugees that live in Britain. These should be wide-ranging and include people of different ethnicities. Include some famous people, adults and children. See resources for suggestions.
- A large sheet of paper posing the question ‘What Connects Us?’
Process
Display the photographs with the sheet of paper headed, ‘What Connects Us?’
Invite the children to think about this and to write their ideas on the paper. Do not give any clues or further information. Leave for a week so that ideas can be added.
Final reflection
After about a week, take down the paper.
Share the ideas and ask the children to explain them before telling them the answers. If you are using the images we have supplied, they are:
- Rita Ora (singer) was born in Pristina in former Yugoslavia and forced to feel the country during the war (1991 – 2001). She came to England with her family.
- Iman (model) was married to David Bowie was a refugee from Somalia in the early 1970s. She fled with her family and only the clothes on her back, first to Kenya and then the UK.
- Saido Berahino fled Burundi when his mother and father were killed in the civil war. He was just ten years old.
- Russian Yulia Skripal is the daughter of Sergei Skripal. They were both poisoned in an assassination attempt believed to have been committed by the KGB. She sought political asylum in the UK.
- Diep Quan fled Vietnam when she was nine years old with her father. They escaped by boat from Vietnam when the country was caught in a violent dispute between Cambodia and China in 1978 – 79. They were rescued from the dangerous seas by a Scottish cargo ship. She is now an IT consultant for a bank in London.
- The school children are Syrian refugees.
- Does this information surprise you?
Vocabulary
| Key vocabulary | refugee, civil war |
|---|---|
| Subject-specific and technical vocabulary | |
| Academic process words | |
| Advanced vocabulary | |
| Morphological investigation | |
| Etymological investigation | |
| Idioms |