B O O K P U B L I S H E R S

Teachers Notes (Primary) by Dr Robyn Sheahan-Bright

Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story

Kate de Goldi. Illustrated by Jacqui Colley ISBN 174114891X [9781741148916]

Recommended for ages 7 – 12

These notes may be reproduced free of charge for use and study within schools but they may not be reproduced (either in whole or in part) and offered for commercial sale.

Introduction .............................................. 2

Story summary.................................... 2

Themes .................................................... 3

Curriculum topics ....................................... 3

English - Creative Writing...................... 3

English & Art – Illustration and Visual Texts......................................... 5

Creative Arts – Drama & Music............... 6

Studies of Society & Environment ........... 6

Maths ................................................. 7

Conclusion ................................................ 7

Bibliography of related texts and other sources ............................................ 7

About the writers and illustrator................... 8

Blackline masters...................................9-15

83 Alexander Street PO Box 8500 Crows Nest, Sydney St Leonards NSW 2065 NSW 1590 ph: (61 2) 8425 0100 info@allenandunwin.com Allen & Unwin PTY LTD Australia Australia fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 www.allenandunwin.com ABN 79 003 994 278

INTRODUCTION

Lolly Leopold is ‘a one-off’. New Zealanders Kate de Goldi and Jacqui Colley have in their award-winning picture book Clubs created an engagingly subversive heroine for younger readers in a brilliantly illustrative collage style.

Lolly (or Lorenza D. Leopold) is as original a creation as her favourite teacher Ms Love, who is (in Mr Leopold’s words) ‘one out of the box’ as well.

The written text by Kate de Goldi is a delicious concoction of whimsy and ingenuity which speaks with the authority of a strong sense of narrative voice:

The clubs epidemic breaks out in March like a giant nit plague. It spreads through our class ’til practically everyone’s infected. Not me. I must be inoculated.

The visual text by Jacqui Colley presents a collage of images representing Lolly’s tastes, and offering the reader insights into her pet hates and obsessions. It consists of the very contemporary and post-modern collision of ideas contained in image, medium, and intertextual reference.

The creators clearly love the way that a book’s design can combine these two texts and make something new from their combination.

At its heart this book is about peer group pressure. It’s about the confines of a society which is obsessed with physical appearance and forces girls to adopt stereotypical behaviour by playing with Barbie dolls and being mean to girls who won’t ‘play the game’. It’s about boys who reject those who don’t want to be ‘macho’.

It’s also about the dubious promotion of publicity hype and mass marketing when it encourages such conformity.

Such concepts are lampooned and questioned in a confectionary of delights which tease, inform, question and provoke the reader to have fun with words, ideas, images and textual design in a cacophony of playful inter-connections.

This book is about being yourself and preserving your individuality. It’s about the way a creative teacher can encourage her students to embrace their individual interests and their strengths.

I’d be prepared to predict that Clubs will become an instant ‘classic’.

And the GREAT thing is that it is the first in a series.

Lolly Rules, OK?

STORY SUMMARY

Ms Love says that CLUB is a homonym. It can mean two different things: 1. a group of likeminded people, or 2. a stick to beat people with.

The topic here is ‘clubs’ and how kids are not only included but excluded by them.

When Club mania breaks out and Lolly’s class members suddenly become obsessed with starting clubs — the Barbie Club, the Kitty Club, the Lego Club and the Harry Potter club – Lolly is mortified.

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She doesn’t see the point of any of them, and her beloved teacher Ms Love obviously agrees. The clubs have stupid rules which include restricted entry; some are only for girls and some only for boys. Class warfare breaks out whenever anyone tries to make an ‘unlawful entry’ to them. So Ms Love ends up banning them one by one, just to keep the peace.

But then Lolly and her two ‘new best friends’ Byron and Adele decide to invent a club of their very own. The Grass Growing Spectators’ Club isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it suits them perfectly!

Lolly’s diary is a window into the way her mind works and is also a record of the class’s activities over a very eventful term.

This is a charming story about real school situations viewed through the quirky eyes of two very distinctive artists. They use the picture book format in an inventive and original way to explore a range of themes in this triumph of intertextuality.

THEMES

This book offers the opportunity to explore several themes with students:

• Individuality

• Peer group pressure

• Kids’ increasing obsession with physical appearance which in extreme cases leads to eating disorders, and to manufactured grooming and even to surgery to alter their appearances.

• Publicity and Mass Marketing Promotion which frequently encourages conformity.

CURRICULUM TOPICS

It also suggests several curriculum-based activities in a variety of subject areas, for instance:

• English – Creative Writing

• English & Art – Illustration and Visual Texts

• Creative Arts – Drama and Music

• Studies of Society and Environment

• Maths

ENGLISH – CREATIVE WRITING

Clubs encourages word play and the enjoyment of ‘secret’ languages – homophones, homonyms, sign language and backward spelling.

Exercise: Homophones are words with the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling eg knot/not. Create a list of homophones.

Exercise: Homonyms are words (like ‘Clubs’) with the same spelling but different meanings and origins. Eg light (to light up a room) and light (opposite of heavy). Create a list of homonyms. Start with the ones which appear in this book.

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Exercise: Lolly has made a mistake in her list of homonyms at the back of the book. What is it?

Exercise: Learn sign language and conduct a class discussion using it.

Exercise: Have a spelling names backwards contest. Set a timer so each person in the class has to spell aloud 3 names backwards in a given time. [See also BLM 3 – Acrostic Poem]

Exercise: Lolly, Adele and Byron have five letters in their names. Make a list of all the names with five letters that you can think of.

The author relishes non-clichéd descriptions (‘My teacher is a lovesome creature’) and delights in idiosyncratic expressions (‘knock me down with a wet vole’)

Exercise: Collect your own list of expressions like this. Then write a story using some of them.

Exercise: Lolly calls Miss Love a ‘lovesome creature’. Make up a new adjective and noun to describe your favourite teacher.

The book is full of compound nouns and two-word phrases which might be used to discuss logical sentence construction.

Exercise: Ask the students to construct a sentence using the following phrases from the book: ‘tough bargain’; ‘big trouble’; ‘living hell’; ‘glorious creature’.

There are several commonly used expressions employed in the book.

Exercise: Ask students to write their own explanation for what these expressions mean: ‘it’s shark eat shark out there; ‘one out of the box’; ‘a thing of the past’; 'every family has a black sheep’; ‘crime against nature’; ‘laughing stock’. [See BLM 2 - Idioms]

The book also demonstrates list-making.

Question: How many different types of lists can you find in this book? Eg Class List, Checklist for Barbie Show, Bethany Rules etc.

Exercise: Writing lists is an excellent strategy for beginning a text. Many folk tales for example, use lists as part of their structure. Try writing a story using a list.

Exercise: Write a list of any words in the book which you don’t understand the meaning of. Then use a dictionary and discover their meaning.

Exercise: Inside the back cover of the book are written lists which Lolly is keeping. One of them is a ‘Words of the Week’ list. Start you own list – every time you hear a word that you don’t understand write it down and find out what it means.

Exercise: How many people were mentioned in the book? Make a list of all the characters in this book as if it were a cast list. Write a brief description of their character from the way they behave or are described in this book.

Exercise: How many brand names were mentioned? Write a list!

Exercise: This book was first published in NZ and contains a few words and names in the Maori language. Can you find them? Make a list!

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Colloquialisms are slang words which are used instead of the usual word for the object, person, animal or thing described. Eg Ms Love says that if Lolly tells the Clubs story it’ll put ‘smiles on all the grandparents’ dials’. What is a dial? Make a list of all the words you know which stand for something else.

This book offers models for the creative use of figures of speech in inventive descriptions eg ‘hang there like a trio of tree sloths’.

Exercise: Create your own original similes like this one.

It also shows how you can create humour through exaggeration eg Mrs Lopdell the school secretary ‘has been at the school since prehistoric times’.

Exercise: Write an exaggerated sentence like this one.

Lolly is a strong female character and so is her teacher Ms Love.

Exercise: Read other books with strong girl characters eg Robin Klein’s Penny Pollard series (Hodder); Go Girl (Hardie Grant Egmont) series; Lauren Child’s Clarice Bean series (Hachette); Elizabeth Honey’s Stella Street series (Allen & Unwin).

ENGLISH AND ART – ILLUSTRATION AND VISUAL TEXTS

In this book intertextuality is evident in the pictures which repay close reading since they contain many references to a range of other texts.

Exercise: On the page beginning ‘My teacher is a glorious creature…’ there is a newspaper cutting, a luggage label, a postcard and a pile of books with titles on their spine. Read these texts carefully and discover their relationship to the main story.

Exercise: Read other picture books for older readers in which text and image collide in this same intertextual fashion, and conduct a unit of work on them. Invite students to compare and discuss the design, and the sub-text in these works. Examples might include:

Child, Lauren, Clarice Bean series (Hachette)

Gaiman, Neil, Wolves in the Walls Ill. By Dave McKean (Bloomsbury, 2003)

Gravett, Emily, Wolves (Macmillan, 2005)

Rogers, Gregory, The Boy the Bear the Baron the Bard (Allen & Unwin, 2004)

Rogers, Gregory, Midsummer Knight (Allen & Unwin, 2006)

Scieszka, Jon and Lane Smith, Seen Art? (Viking, 2005)

Scieszka, Jon and Lane Smith, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (Viking, 1992)

Tan, Shaun, The Lost Thing (Lothian, 2000)

Mixed Medium is used here, with a variety of techniques – drawing, digital photography, collage, crayon lettering, hand writing, painting – being employed in the making of these artworks. [See BLM 4 – Lolly Leopold Poster and BLM 6 – Drawing Faces]

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Exercise: Use collage in a similar manner to create your own diary of the week at your school. Start an ordinary exercise book and decorate it in any way you choose.

CREATIVE ARTS – DRAMA AND MUSIC

This book could be dramatised for class performance.

Exercise: Choose a funny scene in the book, write a brief script and then act it out.

Some of the emotional issues in it could also be mimed or improvised.

Exercise: Discuss peer group pressure and then act out the emotions involved in mime.

It could be used in music lessons.

Exercise: Play an Elvis song such as ‘Love Me Tender’ on trumpet, piano or another instrument.

STUDY OF SOCIETY AND THE ENVIRONMENT (SOSE)

Identity

Exercise: Find words in the book which describe the identity of characters. What words would you use to describe yourself?

Peer group pressure and bullying

Exercise: Discuss these issues with the class and encourage frank discussion.

Individual Rights–Ms Love’s reaction to each club when it becomes extreme is to cite a particular organisation or international convention which protects the individual’s rights. For example, because the HP club is for boys only she says ‘the Human Rights Commission would blast the HP club out of the water’.

Exercise: Read about the International Convention of Rights for Children, and what the Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International do. Discuss individual rights with the class.

Consumerism and Fads–Each of the clubs (except the Kitten Club) are based on contemporary faddism which encourages kids to collect mass produced toys as signs of material or ‘cultural capital’ amongst their peer groups. Lolly rejects this sort of thinking; when she had a Barbie she gave it an extreme makeover!

Exercise: Ask the students to compare brand name with non-brand name toys and games. Have them write a list of all the things they enjoy which are not associated with a brand name.

Exercise: Make up a list of crazy names for Barbies.

Exercise: Is a Harry Potter Club a good idea? Conduct a class debate.

Exercise: What crazy club would you like to start? Come up with your own totally original club idea and then write a list of ‘rules’ to go with it. Make it as funny as you can.

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Exercise: On the cover are several badges which related to the various clubs in the book. Design a badge which relates to the crazy club you created in the exercise above. [See BLM 5 - Badges]

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Stereotypes

Exercise: Discuss the stereotypes of boys and girls and their pastimes – the Barbie and Kitten clubs are for girls; the Lego and HP clubs for boys – and encourage students to identify the things they like doing whether they are for boys or girls. Encourage shared team sports such as soccer and shared class activities such as sewing, cooking, writing and art.

MATHS

There are several images which invite questions about numbers in this book.

Question: How many kids are depicted in the picture of Lolly’s class? How many girls and how many boys?

Questions: How many Barbie dolls can you find? How many brand names could you find in the pictures? [The lists mentioned under creative writing might also form part of this maths activity.]

Question: What numbers are included in the text of this book? [See also BLM1 - Word Find]

CONCLUSION Lolly is a girl who inspires admiration for her fearless and confident ways.

Her teacher Ms Love certainly seems to love her.

So do Adele and Byron.

And even though she drives her parents mad, her dad obviously has a sneaking respect for his daughter, too.

In fact, she could inspire a fan club of her own!

She’s sassy, funny, inventive and a totally original character.

AND SHE’LL BE BACKKKKK…!!!

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF RELATED TEXTS AND OTHER SOURCES Lolly Leopold website: http:// www.lollyleopold.com

Nagerkerke, Bill ‘Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story’ Magpies New Zealand Supplement Vol 20 No 1 March 2005, pp 4-5.

VISUAL LITERACY

Anstey, Michele and Bull, Geoff. Reading the Visual. Sydney: Harcourt, 2000.

Doonan, Jane, ‘Drawing on the Text: Ron Brooks and the Art of Collaboration,’ in Bull, Geoff, and Anstey, Michele, eds. Crossing the Boundaries. French’s Forest, NSW: Pearson Education, Prentice Hall, 2002.

Doonan, Jane. Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Thimble Press, 1993.

Wagner, Erica. ‘Listening to the Language of Pictures’, Magpies, Vol 19, Issue 1, March 2004, pp 8-10.

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ABOUT THE WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATOR

KATE DE GOLDI

Kate de Goldi has written three novels for young adults. She is a regular reviewer of children’s books on National Radio, has hosted Bookenz a television series, and teaches writing workshops throughout New Zealand. She was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1958, and before writing fiction, held various jobs including library assistant, piano teacher, university tutor, nanny and researcher for the Marriage Guidance Council. She wrote her first short story entitled Parkhaven Hotel in 1987, for which she won the 1988 American Express Short Story Award. In 1991, she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award for A Girl's Best Friend. In 1994, as Kate Flannery, she wrote Like You, Really, a collection of adult short stories published by Penguin. The book was selected as a top 20 title for the 1994 New Zealand Listener Women’s Book Festival, where De Goldi was a popular guest speaker.

Her more recent work has been in the genre of young adult literature. In 1995, she contributed to Falling in Love (Puffin), a collection of short stories for young adults edited by Tessa Duder. For her debut young adult novel, Sanctuary (Puffin 1996), De Goldi was named winner of the 1997 New Zealand Post Children s Book Award in Senior Fiction. She has also written Love, Charlie Mike (Penguin YA) which was published in July 1997 and Closed Stranger (1999) which was shortlisted for the NZ Post Children s Book Award in Senior Fiction. Clubs won Book of the Year and Picture Book of the year in the NZ Post Awards 2005(Children and Young Adults).

JACQUI COLLEY

Jacqui Colley is a visual artist and partner in a design and communications studio based in Wellington. She works on a range of media including video documentary and print. Jacqui has been painting for the last fifteen years and has exhibited in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and her work is in private collections internationally. Jacqui is the recipient of two New Zealand Post Book Awards for children and young adults. Best Picture Book and Book of the Year 2005 for Clubs. In 2005 Jacqui also won the LIANZA award for Illustrator of the Year and the Spectrum Print Award for Typographer of the Year for her work on Clubs. She grew up in Africa and now lives in New Zealand. Find out more by visiting her website. http://www.jacquicolley.com/

DR ROBYN SHEAHAN-BRIGHT

Dr Robyn Sheahan-Bright has operated justified text writing and publishing consultancy services since 1997. She teaches writing for children and young adolescents at Griffith University (Gold Coast). She also conducts an online course on publishing and technology for USQ and has a Master of Letters in Children’s Literature UNE). She is an Honorary Life Member of the Qld Writers Centre, of which she was founding director from 1991-1997, and has been a Director of Jam Roll Press (1987-94) and President of Children’s Book Council of Australia (Qld) (1991-3). Her latest publication is Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005 co-edited with Craig Munro (UQP, 2006). She was co-editor with Stuart Glover of Hot Iron: Corrugated Sky: a Century of Queensland Writing (UQP and QWC, 2002); editor/compiler of Nightmares in Paradise (UQP, 1994), Original Sin (UQP, 1996), Paradise to Paranoia (with Nigel Krauth, UQP, 1995) and School’s Out (with Colin Symes, QUT, 1998). Widely published in literature journals, she reviews for the Australian Book Review and The Courier-Mail, has entries in the Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English and chapters in Something to Crow About: Perspectives in Literature for Young People (edited by Sue Clancy, Charles Sturt University, 1999), Children’s Literature Matters (edited by Robin Pope, ACLAR, 2001) and Crossing the Boundaries (edited by Geoff Bull and Michele Anstey, Pearson Education Australia, 2002). She has been coordinating judge for the Penguin Somerset College National Novella Writing Competition for School Age Writers from 2000, and a judge since its inception a year earlier. She is also a member of the Qld Premier’s Literary Awards judging panel.

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BLM 1

WORD FIND Here is a list of words from 'Clubs'. Find them in the word find below. The words can appear horizontally, vertically or diagonally and backwards or forwards.

Epidemic Gravity Zero Wet Story Witty Snappy Placard Vole Plague Lurk Grumpy Exclusive Rules Acres Zen Every Guppy Decibel Sky-high Leopold Gene Lizards Love Surrender Rogue Real Smacks Feline Dawdling Hip Tartar Inoculate Not Club Nun King Staff Knot Big Makeover Matted Acid Says Upside Spectator Dribbly Mean Pacifist Elderly Tough Alien Bargain Dinghy Out Oboe One Note Sip Is

Then make list of those words you’re not familiar with and find out what they mean.

E P I D E M I C L U B F E L I N E X T D R P A L I E N F H I P N N L C A E I L K I N G O L E O P O L D L R C B A E M A T T E D D I C A E U T I B C O T S S I P L A G U E R S A B L A V U T Y H G N I D L O L I R E Y R E O N U N I A G R A B Y V O L E D R A U S P E C T A T O R E V E R Y E P S U R R E N D E R K S K C A M S A Y S O S E R C A U N T O N K I O R E Z G E N E N O L O D A W D L I N G E U L U R K W E T L A E R G I B U N E L O V E I S O S K Y H I G H P Y M P U R G T N U S D R A Z I L P A C I F I S T U G I G R A V I T Y I S N A P P Y N H

Q. Which of these words appear twice in this word find and are homophones for each other?

Q. Which of the other words are Homophones?

Q. Which can be both a homophone and a homonym?

Q. Which of these words can be Homonyms?

Q. Which 4 of the wordfind words aren’t in this book!

Q. Which one of them is a palindrome and also appears twice in this word find? [A Palindrome is a word which is spelt the same way backwards as it is forwards.]

Q. Which two-lettered word appears 7 times in this word find?

Q. How many three letter words are included in this word find?

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BLM 1 - ANSWERS

WORD FIND – ANSWERS

Q. Which of these words appear twice in this word find and are homophones for each other?

A. Knot and Not.

Q. Which of the other words are Homophones?

A. One (Won); Real (Reel); Nun (None); Mean (Mien).

Q. Which can be both a homophone and a homonym?

A. Mean (to mean something; to be mean to someone); Mien (attitude or demeanour).

Q. Which of these words can be Homonyms?

A. Staff, Upside, Club, Mean, Note, Hip, Wet, Smacks.

Q. Which 4 of the wordfind words aren’t in this book!

A. Alone, oboe, note, sip.

Q. Which one of them is a palindrome and also appears twice in this word find? [A Palindrome is a word which is spelt the same way backwards as it is forwards.]

A. Nun.

Q. Which two-lettered word appears 7 times in this word find?

A. Is.

Q. How many three letter words are included in this word find?

A. Nine.

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BLM 2

IDIOMS

Write the meaning of these phrases on the lines below each. Hey is for horses! Flat out like lizards drinking One out of the box It’s shark eat shark out there. Strictly for pea-brains. They’d better keep their heads down. A thing of the past. I’d rather watch grass grow. Knock me down with a wet vole. Thrashing her brains out.

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BLM 3

ACROSTIC POEM

Write an Acrostic poem about Lolly using the first letters of her name.

L O L L Y L E O P O L D

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BLM 4

LOLLY LEOPOLD POSTER Create a collage of your own and make a poster for Clubs.

Choose some of the shapes below and cut them out.

(Older students could design their covers on a computer and insert the Clip Art and text into it.)

In the middle of your poster, write in large letters and decorate them.

Write by Kate de Goldi and Jacqui Colley in running writing below the title.

Now paste your cutout shapes around the text.

Colour in and decorate the whole poster and then hang it in your classroom.

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BLM 5

BADGES

These are shapes to be used for making badges. Cut them out and decorate them with your own badge - perhaps associated with the club you’ve invented.

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BLM 6 – photocopy onto A3 paper

DRAWING FACES

Look at the pictures of the kids in Lolly’s class on the opening page of this book. Make up your own class of kids using the simple shapes below.

Add expression and colour to the faces; add hair to the heads; and add details such as an eye-patch or spectacles, a hat, a collar etc. You can draw these details or use collage: cut out eyes etc from magazines and glue paper and cloth onto the faces. Give the kids in your class names and write them below their pictures.

See how we’re all the same and yet all different as well?

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