Literacy Unit - Rowan of Rin #2

We are working through the book Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda. Last week we read chapters 3 and 4 and focused on characterisation in a novel. For an overview of activities in earlier chapters please use this link: Chapters 1 and 2.

Chapters 3 and 4 - Summary
The people of Rin decide that despite the lack of help from Sheba, a party must be formed to head up the mountain and get the stream flowing again. The strongest and bravest volunteer and all head home for the night to make preparations and get a good night's sleep. Rowan, however, is haunted by nightmares and awakes to discover that the stick thrown at him by Sheba, is in fact a map of the mountain. He rushes to show the villagers so that the party may take it on their journey. But, to everyone's dismay, the map can only be seen when in the hands of Rowan. Reluctantly the people agree that Rowan must join the party on the journey.

Activities

Code Breaker

• Look for possessive nouns in the text and explore the punctuation used with them.
• Look at proper nouns with particular attention to the different names used for the characters eg. Strong Jonn and Jonn of the Orchard.

Text Participant

• Create a sociogram that shows all the people of Rin, the role they play in the community and their connections to one another. (We made this one with Kidspiration. We changed the colour of the bubbles of the people going up the mountain. Students scanned through the book to find the details we needed.)

Text User

• Discuss how we make judgements of each others' character in real-life using appearance, conversation and actions.
• Discuss how this translates to a book and examine characterisation in terms of description, dialogue, actions and thoughts.

Text Analyst

• Group students to represent the members of the party going up the mountain.
• Groups scan through the book to find out what Emily Rodda revealed about their character. They create a wordle and a picture of their character.
• They make a short video interview - one person pretends to be the character, another the interviewer, and a third the camera person. The interviewer asks questions about how the character is feeling about the impending journey.

Update 2014: This year, as an alternative to the video, students wrote a diary entry from the perspective of their character outlining their feelings about the journey. We also wrote descriptions of the characters, including one or more sentences about who the character is, five or more sentences about the characteristics of that character, and closing with an evaluative statement about the character.

Here is the complete Rowan of Rin unit.