Alice in Wonderland

[learnandsay]

A couple of years ago I went to an Explore Learning event in a library which was being held on the subject of Alice. Explore had confused Through the Looking Glass with Wonderland and had a mixture of the two plots for the children to put in order. The group leader had no problem putting hers in order because the sequence was on her instruction sheet! Most of the children found it quite easy though their answers were inventive! (They were Y1s from various schools.) The only person having any difficulty was me. When I complained I was told that was the way it was and the sequence must be correct because the leader had a printed copy.

So, I don't think five and six year olds (or younger in our case) have a problem with Alice. (Though the staff at Explore Learning do.)

When I told one of my friends about the event she said that the sample of attending children might not be truly representative of anything because only those parents who were confident that their children would get something from such an event would send their children in the first place. Initially the group leader informed me that my daughter was too young to join in. Unassisted that would have been true, but with my help she had a great time. One child did struggle because she had only seen the film and had never read or heard the text.

Um, I'm not sure what the point of this post is? Are you saying that Alice in Wonderland is accessible to 5 and 6 year olds?
If so, I think you may be confusing 2 concepts. I expect the "point" of the workshop was for the children to work out which points came at the beginning, middle and end and work out the logical order.
I imagine that is why you struggled as you tried to relate it to your knowledge of the book and not just as an exercise. DD was used to doing this sort of thing from Reception.

DD did an Alice in Wonderland themed challenge at RAinbows last year. Some of the girls had seen the film and none had read the book. Didn't stop them enjoying it.

It follows on from a comment about Wonderland in another thread (about a non Lewis Carroll subject) in which a poster was arguing that modern children are not educated enough to understand Alice. I say that indeed they are educated enough and at a very young age too.

And the reason I struggled was because (as I said) Explore Learning gave examples from two different Carroll books but asked for them to be ordered according to the plot of Wonderland. This is clearly impossible.

Learnandsay - when I saw the title of this thread I knew you would be the OP .

I remember a thread from you a while ago about your DD reading this particular book. It appears to be a favourite of yours.

General consensus then, that it is not a book most 5 or 6 year olds are exposed to as the themes and language are too complex/sophisticated.

However the story is a good one and appeals to children - hence the number of films aimed at that age group.

These types of exercises allow children to learn order & plot structure. They don't have to be familiar with a particular text - it just has to make sense.

The fact that YOU were the only one who struggled is kind of irrelevant isn't it

Most 5 and 6 year olds won't have read Alice in Wonderland/had it read to them. Some may have seen the film.

Doesn't sound like it was necessary to be familiar with the story to do this exercise though. If it was, I doubt the leader would have picked Alice in Wonderland for a group of 5 and 6 year olds - more likely something like the Gruffalo or a traditional fairy tale would have been more universal.

Personally I think the exercise was over-ambitious considering the fact that Explore Learning themselves didn't know the plot of Alice in Wonderland it was a bit unfair of them to expect the five year olds to know it.

But yes. In order to do the exercise you had to be familiar with the story and its characters. The group leader had a series of episodes, the Cheshire Cat's disappearance, the cards painting the fruit trees, the tea party and Tweedle Dee & his brother's argument (which doesn't happen in the Wonderland book but in Looking Glass)

She didn't read, summarise or recap on the story at all but relied on the children (and my) knowledge of the book (Wonderland) for us to put the episodes in order. I told her about the problem of Tweedle Dee and she disagreed with me because that's what it said on her sheet!

Explore Learning "teachers" tend to be minimum wage employees who just have GCSEs as a basic qualification - their role is really just supervising children on computers.

Does that really matter though? If none of them had read the book? It was an exercise in chronology and order. It really doesn't matter what order they came up with as long as they could explain why they chose it.

You do appear to start an awful lot of threads about how inadequate the activities are which you take your children to.

Wasn't there another one about your children not enjoying historical reenactments?

DD has not read Alice in Wonderland.
But she could put a series of plot lines in a sensible order.
She could also do this if they came from different books (as her 7 year old brain would not worry about this).
Were you not told the learning intention for the exercise? (DD seems to be told the learning intention for everything she does).