I have just been asked to move to upper Elementary next year, and I am so excited. I have a master's degree in literature and am completing one in reading this summer, so I can't wait to focus solely on ELA in the fall! In preparation, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how to encourage my reluctant writers. While I know every class is different, this year's rising fifth graders contains a group of very bright boys who do not enjoy writing, but, they do love reading and video games.
Recently, a fellow teacher introduced me to the concept of narrative gaming-- it is a unique concept where the player is expected to write the story of the game. The one I am exploring now is called "Elegy for a Dead World." In it, the character explores three "dead" worlds that the inhabitants have abandoned. The gamer's job is to narrate the explorer's experience in a journal, as they slowly create what happened to the people, technology, flora and fauna of each world.
What does this have to do with reading? The game's creator based each world on the "end of times" poetry written by romantic poets, specifically Percy Shelley's Ozymandias, Lord Byron's Darkness, and John Keats' When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be. It is my intention to "front load" the students' schema with these poems, analyzing them together in order to inspire them when they play the game. Below, I will discuss some of my thinking from particular excerpts.
From Shelley's Ozymandias: And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my mighty works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
When I read these two stanzas, I immediately visualized the Egyptian dessert with its crumbling pyramids and sphinx, but that could be because I know the poem refers to Egypt. If I consciously choose to ignore that, these two stanzas could describe an alien world, clearly inhabited at one point, but now abandoned. I infer that the ruler was overly arrogant, having monolithic structures built in his honor, going as far as inscribing them with the demand that all who read it acknowledge his mighty works, yet nothing remains but wind blown sands.
From Keat's
Lord Byron's Darkness is a classic "end of the world" scenario, and I wish I could post it in its entirety here, but it is quite long. When I first read it, the poem called to mind all of the YA dystopian novels that have recently become so popular. Images of a burned out sun, ashes falling from the sky, and two survivors trying desperately to scrape by on a "seasonless, treeless, herbless, manless, lifeless lump of death..." I can picture this world vividly; it raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and I find myself trying to create a full story inspired by the poem--there is a need to know more. This type of feeling is what I hope to inspire in my students, before I turn them loose on the game!
Recently, a fellow teacher introduced me to the concept of narrative gaming-- it is a unique concept where the player is expected to write the story of the game. The one I am exploring now is called "Elegy for a Dead World." In it, the character explores three "dead" worlds that the inhabitants have abandoned. The gamer's job is to narrate the explorer's experience in a journal, as they slowly create what happened to the people, technology, flora and fauna of each world.
What does this have to do with reading? The game's creator based each world on the "end of times" poetry written by romantic poets, specifically Percy Shelley's Ozymandias, Lord Byron's Darkness, and John Keats' When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be. It is my intention to "front load" the students' schema with these poems, analyzing them together in order to inspire them when they play the game. Below, I will discuss some of my thinking from particular excerpts.
From Shelley's Ozymandias: And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my mighty works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
When I read these two stanzas, I immediately visualized the Egyptian dessert with its crumbling pyramids and sphinx, but that could be because I know the poem refers to Egypt. If I consciously choose to ignore that, these two stanzas could describe an alien world, clearly inhabited at one point, but now abandoned. I infer that the ruler was overly arrogant, having monolithic structures built in his honor, going as far as inscribing them with the demand that all who read it acknowledge his mighty works, yet nothing remains but wind blown sands.
From Keat's
Lord Byron's Darkness is a classic "end of the world" scenario, and I wish I could post it in its entirety here, but it is quite long. When I first read it, the poem called to mind all of the YA dystopian novels that have recently become so popular. Images of a burned out sun, ashes falling from the sky, and two survivors trying desperately to scrape by on a "seasonless, treeless, herbless, manless, lifeless lump of death..." I can picture this world vividly; it raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and I find myself trying to create a full story inspired by the poem--there is a need to know more. This type of feeling is what I hope to inspire in my students, before I turn them loose on the game!