Picture this scene in a writing lesson at
school: the experienced teacher has a small queue of fidgety eight year old children,
waiting for her attention, as they had completed their story about a recent
holiday trip. Each page had been beautiful drafted, featuring many of the key
targets for each individual child’s progress. As the teacher went through the essays,
one by one, she discovered a common problem – her class had no understanding of
how to improve their work using a thesaurus. They had successfully removed the
words ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ from their pages, just as she had instructed, and
replaced them with substitutes such as depressed, suicidal and ecstatic, none
of which made sense in the context. But, why should they? The children had no
idea what these words mean!
That night, being the conscientious soul
that she was, she tossed and turned, trying to overcome this problem in a
simple way which didn’t require her to have children constantly asking her for
help in identifying better words. As she dreamt, the queue to her table grew
longer and longer, snaking down the corridor all the way to the Head teacher’s
office! The next morning, tired and cold, she stumbled to school, grabbed a
coffee and sat down, sullen and alone in her classroom. She felt powerless to
know how to act.
Just at that moment, a colleague from her
year group came round the corner and, having seen her bedraggled condition,
listened to her problem. She hurriedly left the room, before returning with
slightly red cheeks and a multi-coloured book in her hands. It was the solution
to her class needs – ‘The Visual Emotional Thesaurus’!
“Each book is like a mini-teacher that can
be left in the middle of the children’s table. The book explains to the class
through images and examples, how to improve their writing and broaden their
emotional language effectively. It has banished ‘happy’, ‘sad’ and a multitude
of repetitious vocabulary from their writing. Moreover, even children who used
to struggle to grasp thesauri found the images enabled them to access the book
too! I can come and teach the children how to use the book today, if you will
allow me to, and I guarantee that your children will have a clearer
understanding of how to enrich their description of characters by the end of
the half hour.”
Our class teacher nodded, pleased that the
children would have a way forward, and that tonight, she would get a well
deserved night’s sleep.
-Ian Long
Speechmark author of The Blob Visual Emotional Thesaurus
