Lost Thing

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This response to The Lost Thing will be the culmination of previous writing tasks that have given students opportunities to articulate their interpretations and understanding of theme. Panel discussions are ideal vehicles through which students demonstrate understandings and gain experience in engaging in literary discourse. The audience will also benefit from each panel discussion by listening to other interpretations and responses to The Lost Thing. Since the panel discussion requires students to synthesise knowledge and skills gained over previous lessons, extensive preparation time is not required. Even so, at the Year 7/8 level students may gain in confidence by having a practice run within their friendship groups. This character is illustrated in a way to produce puzzlement and curiosity. It is an odd combination of mechanical and organic parts, something it shares with other “things” in the book. Tan has written that he got the idea for The Lost Thing after making a sketch of a crab while at the beach. While the lost thing doesn’t speak in this story, the impression is created that – despite its size – it is gentle and vulnerable. Viewing The Viewer‘: postmodern picture books for teaching and learning in secondary English education

What will become evident from the retrieval chart exercise is that a range of textual elements combine to develop a theme, so that there is a cohesiveness among the elements that can support certain readings more successfully than others. Aspect to aspect: a single subject, including ideas and moods, depicted through different aspects in each panel; Watch the short film that is based on this story. How are they similar / different? Which do you prefer? Well, I’ve loved the other books I’ve read by this author-illustrator, and he recently won an Oscar for a film adaptation of this book (an Academy Award winning animation short I’ve not seen, yet) so I was sufficiently curious to get and read a copy of the book. And, yes, I want to see the film; I can see it being an excellent short.

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As students respond to each of these questions they can attach their post-it notes under the appropriate heading. Each of their contributions should be initialed for later use and to help facilitate discussion. The initial contributions can serve as stimulus for an early discussion with the teacher choosing some interesting responses and asking students to expand on their thoughts.

Has the narrator changed in any way at the end of the story as a result of his encounter with the lost thing? The Lost Thing was the theme for the 2006 Chookahs! Kids Festival at The Arts Centre [28] in Melbourne, with many different activities based on concepts from the book. Teachers can support students as they generate their own interpretations of the text by scaffolding ways of bringing their own understandings and experiences to their readings. Beyond making meaning from individual images, scaffolding a form of pattern recognition can also help create a meaning for the book as a whole. The Development of Themes (PDF, 97KB) retrieval chart offers some themes in the columns to focus on, but can be modified at the teacher’s discretion (a blank column can be left for students willing or able to identify a different theme). The rows beneath each theme are to identify different aspects of the text which are somehow connected or related to the theme. The point here is to assemble the different aspects of the text which can be read as contributing to the theme in some way. By explaining the connection between the textual elements and the theme, students should be encouraged to make statements about the theme. In an interview with the ABC’s Lingua Franca program, Tan uses the metaphor of a battery to imagine the meaning-making dynamic between text and reader. Hugo Award Nomination list". Denvention. Archived from the original on 21 December 2008 . Retrieved 29 March 2008. imagining what happens in the “Utopian” world only glimpsed in the book (perhaps taking one of the things and making it the main character);Il racconto è molto breve, folgorante. Forse troppo. Disegni meravigliosi (come sempre lo sono quelli di questo autore). E il messaggio è altrettanto chiaro e folgorante. Prendere tempo, vedere dove di solito non guardiamo, rallentare, incuriosirsi per tutto quello che c’è di diverso, sforzarsi di aprire l’angolo di visione, anche se impegni, distrazione e falsi obiettivi ce lo impediranno. The creature exists in contrast to the world it inhabits, being whimsical, purposeless, out-of-scale and apparently meaningless - all things that the bureaucracy cannot comprehend, and so it is not worthy of any attention. Being a curiosity is only effective if the populace is curious, and they aren’t, being always “too busy” doing more important things. The Lost Thing itself I always knew would be red and big, so very noticeable, which makes us wonder why nobody really notices it (this is the key question of the story, for which there is no single answer). Its design was based on a pebble crab, a small round crustacean with claws that hinge vertically, and I combined this with the look of an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove, with a big lid on top instead of a mouth. I did not want the creature to have any anthropomorphic features, especially no face, so it’s eyes are reduced to small dots which emerge from a hole. The main thing was that it looked strange and unrecognisable - which is not always easy.

What do you think are the main themes in this story? Remind the children that themes are big ideas that underpin the story. They relate to concerns, ideas, beliefs and feelings about life. Themes do not have to be explicitly stated but are inferred from characters behaviour, narrative structure and lexical choices. One way to identify themes is to look at the decisions, changes or lessons learned. Discuss these in your groups and find some evidence in the text Theme indicators The strapline on the front cover reads ‘A tale for those who have more important things to pay attention to’.Now that you have read the book, how do you think this strapline relates to the story? Thinking about themesAust. Journal of Language & Literacy– Music, multiliteracies and multimodality: Exploring the book and movie versions of Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing A range of Shaun Tan images are presented here from various books, which can be useful when needing a projection for teaching objectives. Set in the near future, a dystopian Melbourne, Australia, The Lost Thing is a story about Shaun who enjoys collecting bottle tops for his bottle top collection. One day, while collecting bottle tops near a beach, he discovers a strange creature, that seems to be a combination of a crab, an octopus, and an industrial boiler. This creature is referred to as "The Lost Thing" by the narrator. In 2012, an exhibition produced by ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing: from Book to Film, showcased illustrations, drawings, interviews and props created for the film and toured throughout Australia over following years.