The Three Little Pigs

Shiva Sotoudeh chose The three little pigs for her Grade 1 class multiliteracies project, seeing the potential of this classic story to stimulate learning across the curriculum, and she trialled her approach over sequential years. Children were introduced to the story in layers, becoming familiarized with the plot and characters through diverse media engaging multidisciplinary thinking and multisensory engagement. In the preliminary trials, the children reasoned through the science behind the materials used by the three little pigs to construct their houses, as put to the ultimate test by the hungry wolf. Which materials would be strongest and why? They constructed their own houses out of paper and Popsicle sticks, and put them to the scientific test. They tackled the math of the story, and tweaked the story socially by adding a fourth little pig: the little sister, who gets her three big brothers out of trouble.

As a qualified teacher of Farsi in the international language program, Shiva was ideally posed to embed the multiple languages of the classroom in children’s retold versions of this story. She sent the children’s stories home to their parents for translation, resulting in customized individual bilingual versions of the story. Children brought their re-imagined characters to life artistically by fashioning them out of clay, and recreating wordless three-dimensional stories as shoebox texts. They painted the backgrounds of 8 squares corresponding to pages, and positioned their clay figures in relief on the squares. These were photographed, input into iMovie and programmed to make claymations. With the help of Anthony Micallef, the music specialist at Joyce Public School, they developed multiple soundtracks for selected claymation versions of The three little pigs using parents’ translations of their children’s stories, resulting in versions in Vietnamese, Farsi, Cantonese, and Yoruba.