Exploring financial and ethical concepts through folktales

English Year 10 AC v9.0 350

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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

By the end of Year 10, students interact with others, and listen to and create spoken and multimodal texts including literary texts. With a range of purposes and for audiences, they discuss ideas and responses to representations, making connections and providing substantiation. They select and experiment with text structures to organise and develop ideas. They select, vary and experiment with language features including rhetorical and literary devices, and experiment with multimodal features and features of voice.

They read, view and comprehend a range of texts created to inform, influence and engage audiences. They analyse and evaluate representations of people, places, events and concepts, and how interpretations of these may be influenced by readers and viewers. They analyse the effects of text structures, and language features including literary devices, intertextual connections, and multimodal features, and their contribution to the aesthetic qualities of texts.

They create written and multimodal texts, including literary texts, for a range of purposes and audiences, expressing ideas and representations, making connections and providing substantiation. They select and experiment with text structures to organise, develop and link ideas and representations. They select, vary and experiment with language features including literary devices, and experiment with multimodal features.

Content descriptions

Literature

Analyse representations of individuals, groups and places and evaluate how they reflect their context in literary texts by first nations Australian, and wide-ranging Australian and world authors. (AC9E10LE01)

Reflect on and extend others’ interpretations of and responses to literature. (AC9E10LE02)

Evaluate the social, moral or ethical positions represented in literature. (AC9E10LE04)

Create and edit literary texts with a sustained “voice”, selecting and adapting text structures, literary devices, and language, auditory and visual features for purposes and audiences. (AC9E10LE08)

Literacy

Analyse and evaluate how people, places, events and concepts are represented in texts and reflect contexts. (AC9E10LY01)

Listen to spoken texts and explain the purposes and effects of text structures and language features, and use interaction skills to discuss and present an opinion about these texts. (AC9E10LY02)

Analyse and evaluate how authors organise ideas in texts to achieve a purpose. (AC9E10LY04)

Integrate comprehension strategies such as visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising, monitoring, questioning and inferring to analyse and interpret complex and abstract ideas. (AC9E10LY05)

Plan, create, edit and publish written and multimodal texts, organising, expanding and developing ideas through experimenting with text structures, language features, literary devices and multimodal features for specific purposes and audiences in ways that may be imaginative, reflective, informative, persuasive, analytical and/or critical. (AC9E10LY06)

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)