CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

There’s no need to call us Ishmael - we didn’t faint on Friday at Novel Ideas, the fantastic professional learning day organised by the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature. The brief was to talk about new titles for Years 7 and 8, so the suitcases were heavier than usual for the long trip.

Morris Gleitzman started the day by talking about his books and his writing rationale. A first person narrative enables readers to empathise with the main characters; the curve balls keep readers engaged and have them asking questions. And the three essential questions he believes all young readers should be asking in any text are:

• Who is telling us?
• Why are they telling us?
• What does what they are telling us really mean?

In the course of their stories, all of Morris’s characters undergo a process that he believes is a recipe for anyone’s successful life journey:

• When a problem or obstacle confronts them, they know how to find the information they need to look for a solution
• They take responsibility for the tasks, challenges and problems in their lives
• They know what questions to ask and to question everything they are told
• They are creative thinkers
• They know what moral choices to make, but these are not always clear-cut, and they understand that the choices they make could have negative consequences for others

Morris started the day with a thought-provoking talk that offered a useful context for looking at any of his books. His latest title Then, due to be published soon, is a sequel to the tough Holocaust story, Once.

More about Novel Ideas soon.