The Three Billy Goats Gruff

In this triadic consortium of grade 1 teachers with the music specialist, we see how learning can be shared in a small community of practice. The children in Michelle Holland’s and Shiva Sotoudeh’s classes learn the classic tale on bullying: The three billy goats gruff. Shiva and Michelle explain in their interviews how they each teach the children to recreate the narrative using the creatures of their choice. The children then create their protagonists from craft materials and bring their characters to life through their puppets who enact their rewritten narratives. Anthony, the music teacher, describes teaching the children about musical narratives, showing them how music can support their verbal/written narratives to signal characters and carry meaning just as words do. Shiva further describes her experiments with adults creating a second narrative soundtrack to selected rewritten tales, translating the children’s rewritten stories into their community languages. You can hear the children’s voices in two videotaped English language puppet presentations. For children who are just learning how to read, many through a second language, retelling, scripting, creating the characters for, performing and programming an adapted narrative is impressive multimodal literacy learning!