Jamie's Experiment

Learning Intention:

I am learning how to recognise the point of view that a story is told from so that I can consider which points of view have not been included in the text.

Success Criteria:

• I can identify the points of view that have been prioritised and excluded in a text.
• I can consider the point of view of a different character and speculate what they would be thinking and feeling.
• I can retell a section of the story from another perspective.

Essential Knowledge:

More information about how the author positions the reader to perceive the text can be found in the English Textual Concepts video Point of View.

Read ‘Jamie’s Experiment’ as a class. After reading the text, explain the concept of point of view to students: the position the events of a story are perceived from. We can discover the point of view of a text through asking the following questions:

• Through who’s eyes do we see the events in the story?
• Is the story told in first, second or third person?
• Is there a narrator? Is the narrator a character in the story? Or is the narrator not a character but someone that sees everything? Does the narrator focus on the actions, thoughts or feelings of one character in particular?

Then ask the class who has the main point of view in this story (Jamie). Students should recognise that Jamie is the main character, that he appears in every paragraph of the story, that his thoughts are described and that his name features in the title.

List the characters in this story (his friend Caleb, his mother, his dog Floss and the Tooth Fairy). Then ask the students who would have an interesting point of view to tell the story from? Students are likely to choose the Tooth Fairy as he is the second most important character.

Reread pages 26 – 28, up until the line:

TAP-TAP-TAP. And Jamie was asleep.

Provide students with a table with which they can compare perspectives on events in this extract. Explain to students that they can see inside the Tooth Fairy’s head and therefore should speculate on what he is thinking and feeling when he meets Jamie and rejects his tooth. Some sample answers are in the table below:

Jamie	Tooth Fairy (TF)
Jamie woke to a high, sharp sound.	TF made a high, sharp sound with his fishing rod as he tried to crack the ice. His hands were shaking because it was so cold. Not even his red puffy anorak provided enough warmth.
Jamie saw a man around 15cm high with baggy brown trousers with strings around the knees, a red anorak and a pointy green hat. He was holding a fishing rod.
Jamie saw the man prod the frozen glass and squeak ‘What’s this?’
Jamie was surprised that the TF wasn’t a girl.	The TF was deeply offended that the boy thought that tooth business was only for girls. He was a very experienced and capable TF
Jamie stopped the TF who wanted to leave because the tooth was trapped in frozen water. He smashed the water and released the tooth.
Jamie watched the TF expertly fish out the tooth with his rod.
Jamie was disappointed that the TF refused to give him any money for the tooth because, much to their surprise it was a possum’s tooth, not a human’s.
With a tap on the head, Jamie fell back asleep.	The TF quickly used his rod to tap the boy back to sleep. Angrily he left, what a waste of time and on what a cold night!

 

After students have completed their table comparing perspectives ask them to retell the scene from the point of view of the Tooth Fairy.

This could be a written or a spoken task.