Children’s literature series - The bear and the piano

If you’re new to this series, from time to time I write posts about children’s picture books. These posts review a book I’ve selected but also summarise how I use it in my capacity as a classroom teacher. I do this for my own benefit as I think they will be useful resources to refer back to in years to come, but if other teachers come across them I hope you will also find some practical use from them. Parents who take an interest in their children’s learning may also find them useful.

Previous posts

Fox
Piggybook
The incredible book eating boy
Dear Greenpeace
Giraffes can’t dance
Magic beach
How to heal a broken wing
The day the crayons quit

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The bear and the piano

by David Litchfield

Image source

English author David Litchfield’s first published work is a delightful fish-out-of-water story. A young bear cub discovers a piano in the forest. Having never seen one before he ‘shyly’ touches it and it makes an ‘awful sound’. But he comes back day after day for months and years (Litchfield has a great way of showing the passing of time with his illustrations), until the sounds the piano makes are ‘beautiful’. The bear, now grown up, attracts a group of other bears to watch him perform in the forest. Playing the piano transforms the bear and he begins to dream about life in faraway lands. One day a girl and her father walking through the forest are drawn to the bear playing the piano. They propose to him to come with them to to play the piano for big audiences in the city. The bear is left with a difficult decision to make - he is torn between his home and his family and performing in huge theatres in the big city. The bear chooses to leave but, through his new experiences in the city, he learns more about himself, and eventually returns home. Did he make the right choice? How will bear be received on his return?

This story’s themes of belonging, loyalty versus ambition and perseverance make it an ideal book to read for both enjoyment and learning in the classroom. This is one of those rare books that children seem to never get tired of.

Discussions, teachable moments and tasks within the classroom

The bear is a great character study to model writing literary descriptions. Some of the language features Litchfield has used including noun groups and adverbs can be pulled apart and reconstructed to create an original piece of writing. When studying bear as a character, it’s important to emphasise his extraordinary circumstances. Fully grown, he towers over the piano. His ‘stubby paws’ juxtaposed with the tiny keys of the piano are one example worthy of discussion to highlight this. On the other hand, when the bear performs on stage in the city in ‘giant theatres’ he does not seem so big.

Reading

Abstract concepts

Litchfield uses a lot of phrases that younger readers would probably not be familiar with. Examples: “took him away from the forest”; “fur stand on end”; “went platinum”; “created headlines”; “something tugged at the bear’s heart”.
Invariably, during shared readings, students will question the meanings of some of these. Always take these opportunities as teachable moments. Model cognitive processes of moving from the unknown to the known to explain their meaning - for ‘created headlines’, point to the illustrations of newspapers in texts, discuss the layout and features of a newspaper before pointing to the headline (say ‘This is the headline’), then ask ‘What do you think it would mean to create headlines? What would it take for someone to create headlines?’ - distinguish between the writer of the article who writes the headline, and the subject of the article who creates the headline.

Literary devices - repetition

Litchfield uses repetition to make meaning. Examples - ‘big, bright lights in the big, bright city’; ‘No piano, no bears, no anything’
Discuss: For each example, identify the repeating element, its purpose and how it adds meaning to the text.

Grammar

Noun groups

Litchfield uses an interesting range of noun groups to engage his readers. Examples: huge admiration, wild applause, standing ovation, giant theatres, bright lights, sold-out concerts, magical melodies, stubby paws.
Discuss: identify the adjectives that precede the noun and discuss how they give more meaning to the noun.
Task: students match adjectives with nouns to form noun groups like the above examples. Teaching point: some of these adjectives can be matched with different nouns and still make sense (like ‘huge applause’) - this is OK, it’s an interesting discussion point; TODO: prepare cut-up noun groups for this matching activity.

Verb groups (adverbs)

There are a few examples of adverbs in the text:
‘Shyly, he touched it with his paws.’ - adverb = shyly, verb = touched
‘He speedily crossed the river ... and excitedly bounded into the forest.’ - adverb = speedily, verb = crossed; adverb = excitedly, verb = bounded
Discuss: identify the adverbs and verbs in these examples and discuss how they give more meaning to the verb. TIP: an effective way to demonstrate how adverbs add more meaning to verbs is by ‘acting’ them out. For example, perform the act of touching vs shyly touching. Model with this example, and then ask for student volunteers to perform the other examples.
Teaching point: authors can experiment with adverbs by placing them at the beginning of sentences or before or after the verb. In the shyly example, this would look like:
‘Shyly, he touched it with his paws’ (original - beginning of sentence)
‘He shyly touched it with his paws’ (before the verb)
‘He touched it shyly with his paws’ (after the verb)
Authors make subjective decisions about which choice they think sounds best.

Experimenting with subject-verb-object, noun groups and adjectival phrases and clauses

Typically, K-6 students write in a spoken-like manner. When preparing students for writing, the desired outcome is that they write like authors. Encouraging students to experiment with their writing and take risks helps to develop more author-like writing.

When asked to describe the bear’s appearance, a typical first attempt might look like this:
‘The bear has brown fur’ - this is in the predictable simple sentence structure of subject (bear) - verb (has) - object (fur).
Adjectival phrases add more information to nouns - the object from the first example (fur) can be inserted into an adjectival phrase, allowing an action to be added to the sentence:
‘The bear with brown fur is playing the piano’
The adjectival phrase can be modified and used as a noun group to make it more author-like:
‘The brown-furred bear is playing the piano’ - NB: ‘with brown fur’ has been converted to ‘brown-furred’
Then we could add more information about the bear’s appearance using an adjectival phrase or clause:
‘The brown-furred bear who is wearing a black tuxedo is playing the piano’.
The adjectival clause (it is a clause as opposed to a phrase because it contains a verb group [‘is wearing’] and a noun group [‘black tuxedo’]) gives more information to the reader about the bear’s appearance.

Regularly exposing students to these sentence structures and asking students to discuss the language features within them is a great way to move students along this continuum.

Writing - literary descriptions

The illustration showing bear performing on stage is the one I like to use for modelling literary descriptions. Set up the task by prompting the students to look for details in: the bear’s appearance, the bear’s actions (what is he doing?) and the environment (setting). Give one example for each and write them on separate post-it notes. Examples: stubby paws (appearance), performing (action), giant theatre (environment). Stick the post-it notes as labels on a colour-printed copy of the illustration.
Task: Students are given copies of the same illustration and post-it notes. Students label the details (one label per post-it note) for bear’s appearance, what bear is doing and the environment and stick them on their illustration.
Reflection: students share their labels with the class, and teacher adds student examples to the A3 shared copy. This labelled illustration is the starting point for planning to write a literary description.
Teaching point: When preparing students for writing, use the labels on the post-it notes. Group like ideas together (appearance, actions, environment). Experiment by forming sentences orally using some of the labels. Whilst modelling, try different combinations - different sentence structures, ideas grouped together in different ways, etc.
Example: labels - stubby paws, tuxedo, brown-furred mammal, giant theatre, huge admiring audience, stage, grand piano, tiny keys, performing, playing etc
The brown-furred mammal with stubby paws is playing the tiny-keyed grand piano on stage in a giant theatre.
Task: Students use their plan (labelled illustration) to write a literary description for the bear. Requirements: write three to five sentences, use interesting noun groups, group related ideas together to form compound sentences, the reader should want to know more about this character.
Task: To extend the literary descriptions learning further, have students create their own character and draw a detailed illustration of this character. Repeat the same process (labelling, orally forming sentences, writing sentences). NB: it’s important for teachers to model and guide students through this process, so teachers should create their own original character and model each step before students attempt their own.

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