Beginning critical literacy.

Fellowes, Janet

Teaching children to be critically literate can begin early. The nursery rhyme provides a lovely starting point when working with young learners in teaching them to read with critical awareness. The natural literacy teaching strategies of the early childhood classroom can be used along with careful and effective questioning. Children can be assisted to compare the people in nursery rhymes and themselves or people in their own lives--to determine whose values and world views are being represented in the nursery rhyme.

One example focuses on use of the nursery rhyme, Little Miss Muffet. The rhyme, for those who don't remember, goes like this:

 Little Miss Muffet
 Sat on a tuffet
 Eating her curds and whey
 There came a big spider
 Who sat down beside her
 And frightened Miss Muffet away.

In leading the children into critical analysis of the rhyme, a lesson would commence with Shared reading, role play and discussion. The following questions provide examples of those which support children in thinking about the ideology, in relation to gender, of this text.

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* How do you feel about the nursery rhyme? Why?

* What is the nursery rhyme about?

* Can you describe Miss Muffet?

* How is she the same or different from yourself and girls you know? (consider clothes, hobbies, interests)

* Are all girls like Miss Muffet?

Then the lesson would progress to having the children draw a 'new Miss Muffet'--based on themselves or a girl they know--and with due consideration given to her clothes, expression, speech and the girl's response to spider.

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The final step would be to carry out Shared writing (text innovation) so as to create a new rhyme using the same text structure and a similar event. The children provide the ideas for the new nursery rhyme which represents a girl with whom the children are familiar but, which still involves girl sitting, eating and being confronted by a spider.

The following is an example of an innovation on the Nursery rhyme written by a class of Year 1 children.

 Little Sarah
 Sat on a toadstool
 Eating her chocolate
 There came a big spider
 Who sat down beside her
 And ended up getting
 Stomped on by little Sara.