Wednesday evening saw the continuation of the Mount Carmel Home-School Literacy Partnership program – a collaborative venture which recognises and values parents as the primary and continuing educators of their children. This week’s Literacy Conversation was held for parents and carers of our current Year 7 cohort and focused primarily on the critical role of reading in maximising student learning outcomes.

Wednesday’s Literacy Conversation provided parents with the opportunity to explore the various books studied by Year 7 students as part of their English course. It also allowed for a demonstration of some of the processes which support reading and writing in the secondary classroom. In considering the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, Morris Gleitzman’s 2005 novel Once was discussed along with Elie Wiesel’s 1958 memoir Night. Once, set in Poland in 1942, traces a young boy’s quest to find his parents and search for understanding in a world full of conflict and racism. In the process of writing this fiction text, Gleitzman immersed himself in many real-life stories – diaries, letters and memoirs – of people who had experienced the Holocaust. One such story was a book about Janusz Korczak, a Polish doctor who had set up an orphanage for two hundred Jewish children. In 1942, when the Nazis killed these young people, Korczak chose to die with the children rather than abandon them. Korczak’s life story sowed a seed in Gleitzman’s imagination and resulted in the fictional character of Barney in his popular narrative. Another person who influenced Gleitzman was the writer Elie Wiesel whose memoir Night tells the harrowing account of his own experiences in German concentration camps during the Second World War. On Wednesday evening I read a chapter from Wiesel’s nonfiction text. I have included here a very brief extract:

I woke up at dawn on January 29. On my father’s cot there lay another sick person. They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing…

            No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He called out to me and I had not answered.

            I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...

After our discussion, parents were able to borrow Once and Night along with a selection of other popular novels. The thirty-five books borrowed included: C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; George Orwell’s Animal Farm; Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet; John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows; Adeline Yen Mah’s Chinese Cinderella; John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began; and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. It is so heartening to see parents eager to read with their children and share their literary encounters.

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach