Flight of the Fantail by Steph Matuku - Teacher Resource
This is a teaching resource for your class study of the New Zealand novel, Flight of the Fantail, by Steph Matuku. It's a massive, no-prep 91-page resource that includes three separate files including teacher master copy (with answer guide), student workbook, and a third document with a character list and chapter summaries. It is designed for students in years 10 and 11. (Very weird that there are 91 short chapters in this book and my resource came to 91 pages!). See a preview of this resource here.
Here's what you get:
ONE
The teacher’s resource book which includes all student activities with the answers typed in to save your busy brain! It also includes the character list, chapter summaries and further activity ideas you might like to try in your classroom from writing activities to listening/speaking activities to presenting activities.
TWO
A booklet of student activities (which you can flip through here). Activities include:
- Work for groups of chapters that cover reading, language and response activities. If you’re reading the novel in class with/to students, you could stop and get them to work through these as you complete the grouped chapters. Alternatively, they could be set for homework perhaps. (See note below about the page on structure.)
- Notes and activities about our usual elements of literature including:
-Setting
-Characters
-Structure
-Symbolism
-main ideas
-A Mātauranga Māori lens
-Traditional exam-style questions
THREE
A booklet containing a character list and chapter summaries – if you want to give the character list to students before they read the novel, you might want to take out the spoiler alerts! I have put these in red to help you find them easily. I wouldn’t make the chapter summaries available to students until after they’ve read the novel! Note: chapters that I consider extra important have an asterisk beside them!
You can approach/use this resource in any way you like. You can use everything as is, give students only some parts, adapt parts, use the resource to bounce from as you think up alternative teaching strategies ...whatever you like. It’s all editable, so happy days.
The resource has been designed to deliver to students digitally, or to print in hard copy. They have plenty of room to write their answers. As the student booklet is so large, however, I’d recommend getting students to complete work digitally, then perhaps printing their completed pages of work regarding the elements of literature later (to add to folders/glue into books for study/exam purposes.) Note, it has been produced in Microsoft PowerPoint, resized to A4 sized pages for easy printing. You can easily upload it to your Google Drive or Google Classroom if you prefer that system.
Note, to make navigation easier, the fantail at the top right-hand corner takes you/students back to the table of contents. The table of contents pages are also hyperlinked.