Exploring financial and ethical concepts through folktales

English Year 10 AC v8.4 350

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Introduction

In this set of interconnected learning experiences, students engage in reading folktales to discover the powerful messages they contain. Through stories, they explore financial concepts such as saving, spending, and sharing. Students learn about the concept of giving and the rewards generosity can bring. They also examine how folktales are structured and create meaning. They demonstrate their learning by creating a modern day short story with a financial lesson or philanthropic message.

By engaging students with traditional stories that have clear lessons, these learning experiences support students to develop ethical understanding. Students explore the nature of giving and how sharing contributes to humanity. They develop an awareness of the influence that giving can have on themselves and others.

These concepts are foundational for students to become active and informed citizens.

Achievement standard

Receptive modes (listening, reading and viewing)

By the end of Year 10, students evaluate how text structures can be used in innovative ways by different authors. They explain how the choice of language features, images and vocabulary contributes to the development of individual style.

They develop and justify their own interpretations of texts. They evaluate other interpretations, analysing the evidence used to support them. They listen for ways features within texts can be manipulated to achieve particular effects.

Productive modes (speaking, writing and creating)

Students show how the selection of language features can achieve precision and stylistic effect. They explain different viewpoints, attitudes and perspectives through the development of cohesive and logical arguments. They develop their own style by experimenting with language features, stylistic devices, text structures and images.

Students create a wide range of texts to articulate complex ideas. They make presentations and contribute actively to class and group discussions, building on others' ideas, solving problems, justifying opinions and developing and expanding arguments. They demonstrate understanding of grammar, vary vocabulary choices for impact, and accurately use spelling and punctuation when creating and editing texts.

Content descriptions

Literature

Compare and evaluate a range of representations of individuals and groups in different historical, social and cultural contexts (ACELT1639).

Create imaginative texts that make relevant thematic and intertextual connections with other texts (ACELT1644).

Literacy

Analyse and evaluate how people, cultures, places, events, objects and concepts are represented in texts, including media texts, through language, structural and/or visual choices (ACELY1749).

Use interaction skills to present and discuss an idea and to influence and engage an audience by selecting persuasive language, varying voice tone, pitch, and pace, and using elements such as music and sound effects (ACELY1811).

Create sustained texts, including texts that combine specific digital or media content, for imaginative, informative, or persuasive purposes that reflect upon challenging and complex issues (ACELY1756).

Review, edit and refine students’ own and others’ texts for control of content, organisation, sentence structure, vocabulary, and/or visual features to achieve particular purposes and effects (ACELY1757).

Use a range of software, including word processing programs, confidently, flexibly and imaginatively to create, edit and publish texts, considering the identified purpose and the characteristics of the user (ACELY1776).

Teacher resources

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Quotes visualiser

The gift of giving

 
Story

The Miser and his Gold

 
Deconstruction visualiser

The spendthrift and the swallow

 
Focus questions visualiser

Miserliness and generosity

 
Story

Lord of the Cranes

Student learning resources

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Graphic organiser

Structure of a short story

 
Assessment task

Year 10 short story writing task

Suggested activity sequence

This sequence is intended as a framework to be modified and adapted by teachers to suit the needs of a class group. If you assign this activity to a class, your students will be assigned all student resources on their 'My learning' page. You can also hand-pick the resources students are assigned by selecting individual resources when you add a work item to a class in 'My classes'.

Part A: Exploring ethical principles

Setting the scene

  1. Brainstorm with students contemporary examples of people’s generosity and the act of giving. Examples include:
    • crowd sourcing (and giving)
    • Australian bushfire donations and appeals
    • volunteers (for example, life savers, fire fighters, meals on wheels)
    • essential service workers during COVID-19 pandemic.
  2. As a class, discuss why people give and what it tells us about humanity.

Solo and pair thinking

For this activity you will need post-it notes.

  1. Display the quotes on the quotes visualiser and invite students to think about what they mean.
  2. Students share their thinking with a partner and decide on a real-life example, or an example from literature that exemplifies the meaning of each quote. Students write their example on a post-it note to display on the classroom wall.
  3. Students read the examples of other students.

Exploring folktales

If students have not been introduced to folktales previously, explain the following:

All cultures have stories that are shared. A story from one culture may be similar to the story of another culture. These stories are known as folktales which include fables.
In folktales the characters are not well developed, nor the location clearly described. What is more important to the story is that there is usually conflict between good and evil with good usually being rewarded and evil being punished. Often, the purpose of these stories is to teach a lesson or to describe characteristics of one’s culture. The stories are also entertaining.

Discussing ethical concepts

  1. Read the fable The Miser and his Gold aloud to students.
  2. Ask:
    • What is the moral of this story?
    • How can this moral be applied to the modern world?
    • Can you provide an example of a story (such as a fairy tale) with a similar moral?
    • How does this moral relate to saving?
    • How does this moral relate to spending?

Part B: Deconstructing folktales

Modelling deconstruction

  1. Read the fable The Spendthrift and the Swallow using the deconstruction visualiser. As you read the story, give students time to discuss answers to the questions on each page.
  2. Discuss potential lessons in the story that have relevance to students’ financial choices. Possible prompts include:
    • saving for unplanned events or circumstances in the future
    • the pitfalls of trying to look good or trendy to please others
    • living within your means.
  3. Draw a large Venn diagram on the board. Write Miser on the left circle and Spendthrift and the Swallow on the right circle. Students help fill the circles to show similarities and differences between the 2 stories.
  4. Ask: Is there a common lesson that can be learned even though these stories are quite different?

Deconstructing a story in groups: A couple of misers

  1. Use a grouping strategy to organise students into pairs.
  2. Ask students to search for ‘a couple of misers folktale’ in their browsers or display the story A Couple of Misers on a screen for students to read.
  3. Students use the graphic organiser to identify the structural elements of the story.
  4. Pairs of students connect with another pair to compare their responses on how the story is structured.
  5. Display the couple of misers slides on the focus questions visualiser.
  6. Groups discuss answers to each question.
  7. Groups share their responses.
  8. Brainstorm stories from other cultures with a similar message (for example, King Midas).

Deconstructing a story in groups: Lord of the Cranes

  1. Read the Chinese folktale Lord of the Cranes aloud to students. Various versions of this folktale are available online.
  2. Students use the graphic organiser to identify the structural elements of the story.
  3. Pairs of students connect with another pair to compare their responses on how the story is structured.
  4. Display the lord of the cranes slides on the focus questions visualiser.
  5. Groups discuss answers to each question.
  6. Groups share their responses.
  7. Brainstorm stories from other cultures with a similar message.

Comparing the stories

  1. Draw a large Venn diagram on the board. Write the 2 misers on the left circle and Lord of the Cranes on the right circle. Students help fill the circles to show similarities and differences between the 2 stories and the characters in them.
  2. Ask: Is there a common lesson that can be learned even though these stories are quite different?

Part C: Independent writing

Brainstorming in groups

  1. Use a grouping strategy to organise students into groups of 4.
  2. Groups use evidence from the stories they have read to discuss the following statement:

    ‘Managing money is a fine balancing act; money is for spending, saving and giving, not hoarding or spending and not giving’.

  3. Groups identify how this message is relevant to teenagers.

Choose a discussion strategy to promote collaboration and participation.

Writing a narrative

Students complete the short story writing task. They should be given at least 2 lessons to write their stories and one lesson to publish their stories using information and communication technology (ICT).

Exploring financial and ethical concepts through folktales - Teacher Instructions (PDF, 196.24 KB)