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Strap Box Flyer

Giffen is an unpleasant man who is always on the lookout for ways to trick money out of 'suckers' and his amazing glue seems to be the perfect way to do this. Until he come across Flinty, that is.

Strap Box Flyer is from the pen of one of Australia's most popular writers for children, Paul Jennings. This kit was assembled - without using any glue - by teachers from India, Portugal and Turkey on a NILE (Norwich Institute of Language Education) summer course.

The kit below includes activities for you to print and copy, and the complete text. There is also audio for each of the five parts of the story.

 

Comments

Submitted by Leylasi on Sun, 03/18/2012 - 12:26

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Dear Fitch,

I teach 2d year students of law, so StrapBoxFlyer with all its crime-punishment implication was exactly  what I need to cheer up the class at the end of the second language lesson last Wednesday (they were pretty much exhausted by the time we got to SBF:)

I used data projector both for the images and the text parts.

We started with the slides depicting the main ideas and objects of the story (simultaniously revising some of the vocabulary, e.g. fraud/fraudster, crook (col.),  types of punishment, premeditated murder/manslaughter, moral damage etc.). We didn't divide into groups to guess what story was hidden behind the images, but discussed it together supplementing each other's stories with additional details... No more than 5 min. Some of the students got very close to the original plot

Since we were all getting tired, I decided to switch off audio support and shorten the episodes of the text giving more room for students improvisations. We stopped several times to discuss what was going to happen next and how the slides left were related to this or that episode. Every time I gave a couple of minutes for they could comprehend the text by browsing through it.

We stayed a bit longer on the final episode with Flinty's invention. There was so much to discuss: whether Mr Flint was a crook or a real genious/inventor; reasons why he suggested to cooperate with Giffon; Giffon's time concerns and possible concequences etc.

To sum up, everything went just fine, and it was sooo amusing to see how their face expressions were changing in the course of reading the final sentences of the story...

Nice activity! Though may be a bit wearsome if done in full mode.

Wow, you did work hard!  As you say, 'full mode' can be quite tiring, but one of the reasons we call the materials 'kits' is because you can choose the bits and pieces you want to use and discard the rest.  But a great piece of feedback - I'll be sure to pass it on to the authors.  Thanks.

Submitted by brunarama on Fri, 02/24/2012 - 20:39

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I will use it in my class being sure that everyone will enjoy the story as well as the lesson

Submitted by mgracianam on Sun, 02/26/2012 - 01:26

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Thanks again for your creative work, Nile people! It makes teaching very meaningful- my students love the stories and get easily involved in the activities. And Paul Jennings is great for teens!

María Graciana Salvati/ Trenque Lauquen/ Argentina

Submitted by alisherus on Fri, 03/16/2012 - 10:44

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Thanx a lot. I am getting real pleasure working in here. Keep going like this. :)

Submitted by matbury on Sun, 09/30/2012 - 18:07

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Hi, Read the story, enjoyed it. I ran it through a lexical analysis algorithm and it came up with an estimated reading age of 7 - 8 years old (presuming native speakers). Does the British Council do any such analyses? I think it would be very helpful to teachers if they had such data available so they could make appropriate choices. There's a wide range of techniques and software available and it'd make more sense if the BC did it with the most reliable and accurate tools at their disposal, rather than teachers trying to guess or use lexical analyses of their own. Lexical analysis for L2 readers could possibly be different to L1. It'd also be helpful to see how these texts compare with graded reader levels. The Extensive Reading Foundation (http://erfoundation.org/erf/) compiles headword tables for graded readers to make life easier for teachers: http://www.robwaring.org/er/scale/ERF_levels.htm Another question: I'm going to see how well these resources will work on a Learning Management System. What are the restrictions, copyright, reproduction, distribution, etc., regarding the use of these materials? Presumably you have agreed some terms and conditions with the publisher, Puffin?

Where can I find the audio for the other parts of the story? I can only find the audio for part one.

Submitted by Derek Spafford on Mon, 10/06/2014 - 04:32

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Hi Anouk1 I've passed this onto the team and we are looking into the problem Best wishes Del

Submitted by Cath McLellan on Thu, 11/06/2014 - 14:28

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Hi Anouk1 As you can see we have republished the links to the audio above, so you should be able to access them now without problems. Cheers, Cath

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