Personal experience

I was actually looking for a nice picture book to get some last minute writing in for my dreaded moderation in Year 6 when I stumbled upon Black Dog in the Year 3 classroom. Although this was currently being used in Year 3, I decided to also use it in Year 6 because I loved it and knew my class would too. 

Summary 

The Hope family wake up to an enormous black dog roaming outside of their home.  hey proceed to find all sorts of ways to deal with it besides facing it: turning off the lights shutting the curtains, hiding under covers, etc. In the midst of this avoidance, their fear (the dog) becomes bigger and more intimidating. Their fear continues to grow to enormous heights until the youngest member of their family decides to tackle it head on. 

The pictures 

The illustrations in Black Dog are almost gothic like which suits the theme of this text brilliantly. One of my favourite is the double page spread with the eerie-looking black dog - it always gets a reaction from my readers. I also absolutely love how Pinfold crafts each page. It really is the small details that are fabulous throughout the book. The title page holds a similar drawing to the cover in only that the paw prints of the dog are that of a normal size and on the cover they’re enormous. In this book, that’s based on perceptions, Pinfold does an incredible job of driving that home, in not only his dialogue but his thoughtfully crafted illustrations.

Writing sessions

I wanted a meaty adventure story from my Year 6 class in time for moderation. This book was the perfect choice because we wrote it in the style of Levi Pinfold and it was very easy to adapt. The name 'Hope Family' led us easily to choosing and developing our own 'abstract noun' families. Some examples were the Joy Family, the Dread Family, the Fear Family and the Wonder Family. We then looked at rhythmic style used by Levi and how he maintains the same speech pattern for each character when they first notice the black dog. This was then easily adapted to their own characters for when they notice their 'scary' creature. Once we had spent time developing our characters, we moved onto how we wanted to adapt the setting and plot. 

I love the scene in the book where Small is teasing the dog and ends up taking him on a journey around her home surroundings, singing songs and winding him up. A lot of my class chose to set their story in the city so I found a range of poems about city life so they could get some inspiration and develop their ideas. We then used a Pie Corbett story map style to plan out the journey that our main character was taking their creature on. This was perfect for revising adverbials, prepositions and clause types! 

Once we had it all mapped out, we began to write. Here is a lovely example that I used for moderation.