Opening Doors to a Richer English Curriculum for Ages 10 to 13 (Opening Doors series)

Bob Cox, Leah Crawford, Verity Jones

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781785833977
• eBook ISBN: 9781785834516
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Opening Doors to a Richer English Curriculum for Ages 10 to 13 takes Bob Cox's award-winning 'Opening Doors' series into bold new territories, providing a treasury of techniques and strategies all carefully selected to support the design of a deeper, more creative and more expansive curriculum.

Together with Leah Crawford and Verity Jones, Bob has compiled this rich resource to help teachers enhance their learners' engagement with challenging texts and develop their writing skills as budding wordsmiths. It includes 15 ready-to-use units of work covering a range of inspiring poetry and prose from across the literary tradition, complete with vivid illustrations by Victoria Cox.

Bob, Leah and Verity's innovative ideas on theory, best practice and how to cultivate a pioneering classroom spirit are all integrated into the lesson suggestions, which have been designed for both the teacher's and the learners' immediate benefit.

Together they empower teachers to explore with their learners the scope and depth of literature capable of inspiring high standards and instilling a love of language in its many forms. Furthermore, they help teachers to lay down intricate curricular pathways that will prompt their pupils to better enjoy literature, read and analyse texts with a greater sense of curiosity, and write with more originality.

The book includes a great range of texts both as the core of each unit and as link reading, incorporating some contemporary texts to show how past and present co-exist - and how various literary styles can be taught using similar principles, all of which are open to further adaptation. The authors have also suggested key concepts around which the curriculum can be built, with the units providing examples with which you can work.

All of the extracts and illustrations you will need in order to begin opening doors in your classroom are downloadable, and the book also includes a helpful glossary of key terms.

Part 1

Opening Doors to Poetry

Unit 1

Go and Open the Door

‘The Door’ by Miroslav Holub

Opening Doors key strategy: shape-shifting

Can you understand some of the ways in which the structure of a poem supports the meaning?

How well can you write your own imaginative poem with a shape and structure which supports your theme?

Access strategies

Miroslav Holub is a famous twentieth-century writer (and immunologist) from the Czech Republic whose poetry has been translated and published across the world. His creative ideas make a big impact on the imagination. Some of his poems, like ‘The Door’, are very accessible for younger readers. Naturally, the poem made us think about the title of this series, ‘Opening Doors’. We always had in mind that it is teachers who welcome new thinking, ideas and opportunities into creative classrooms. The ending of ‘The Door’ is one of the reasons we chose to start the book with this image: the draught may seem like an anti-climax, but Holub is saying something important. However small the impact, if (metaphorically) the door is opened a fraction, new winds of thinking may blow. Even a draught is a start!

To learn more about structure there are many possible starting points, but why not take a key stanza from the centre of the poem and start to explore vocabulary and potential meaning:

---

Go and open the door.

If there’s a fog

it will clear.

---

Ask the children to note down questions or anything which arouses their curiosity on sticky notes and place them around the text. You could use the illustration here too. Then ask each group to spend two minutes on each of the following questions:

What did the command and the capital letter ‘G’ make you think about the style of the poem?

What associations do you have with fog?

What associations do you have with doors?

What associations do you have with doors opening?

This will hopefully produce some surprising comments! A mini-plenary now will help you to sift and sort the most original possibilities from the ones making more tenuous links with the imagery.

The discussion that arises during the mini-plenary will give you an opportunity to teach the pupils about imperatives and connotation.

Bob says …

In contexts like this, the love of a text grows simultaneously with knowledge acquisition. Methodologies can include a mixture of dialogic talk, direct transmission and questioning. Step in to introduce or revisit words like ‘connotation’ when necessary, but always with the understanding that thoughtful pupil perceptions will make a deeper impression on their memory.

A taster draft is now possible. Your pupils should write a brief stanza using a new image – something else beyond the door. You could provide just the opening line:

---

Go and open the door.

---

Or, you could offer more scaffolding by including two more lines:

---

Go and open the door.

Even if there’s only

the darkness ticking

---

The stanzas they create should be unusual, perhaps even symbolic, but they must be coherent. The children are learning how...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword by Pie Corbett
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Opening Doors to Poetry
• Part 2: Opening Doors to Prose
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• List of Downloadable Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright