A visit to Clyde Fenton Primary School in Katherine, Northern Territory

Clyde Fenton Primary School in Katherine, NT, hosted Honey Ant Readers (HAR) author Margaret at a morning staff information session on Thursday. She delivered a ppt presentation about the rationale behind the HAR, during which the staff sung ‘Kami tjawani’ (‘Nana dig’ in Luritja) to experience first-hand the value of singing as tool in learning to speak a new language! Several interested and interesting staff from schools nearby gathered together for a stimulating and lively discussion about the HARs and how they can be used in schools with 50/60% Indigenous and 50/40% non- Indigenous student populations. The discussion is eternally ongoing, but one method is dividing students into small reading groups according to ability and language. Another is using the language in the books as a stimulus for discussing the differences in the way people speak. Some teachers get students to ‘translate’ the books into Standard Australian English (SAE) so that they discover the differences for themselves. This can have a significant impact on children who may never have stopped to think about why their friends use different words to them or pronounce the same word differently. It allows teachers to explain that Aboriginal English is a language just like SAE is, and to help others in the class to respect this language. Historically it has often been ‘put down’ as inferior to SAE and speakers of AE have been made to feel that their language is somehow not a language at all but a ‘bad’ version of English! Of course by reading in a different language we don’t start to speak that language rather than in our own, so SAE speakers can also read the HAR and often find it an ‘easy way’ into reading too. The HAR are being used to teach children and young adults in many parts of Australia to learn to read and we frequently hear that ‘reading the HAR is easy’. Great! But we recently heard from a family in Yorkshire, UK, that their daughters have read all the HARs! We are putting out an edition of the HARs in Standard Australian English in 2012 to address the situation where some of the class are speakers of SAE and some are speakers of AE. We are always very happy to hear from teachers, parents and students about what works for them and what doesn’t so that we can keep adapting the HAR to make them as user friendly and successful in encouraging people into reading, as possible.