Gerald says,
"I think our work on this project so far has made me realised both the significance and purpose of remaining open to continuous learning.

In the past, I had never considered that works of children's literature actually meant much more than they were on a surface level. I had never considered that I myself could enjoy them on a different level and more importantly, learning more. It made me realise how beneficial the act of revisiting past things is for the propensity of discovering something that you may have missed before is great."

Shan Wei says,
"I think the most important take away from this project is learning how to apply new knowledge to past situations.

Indeed, through analysis of the various texts, we are exercising the skills and utilising the knowledge we have gained from Literature modules (something that we did not have the chance nor understanding to go through in) to examine texts that we read as young children. This taught me the importance taking different perceptions, as it can reveal new, significant lessons.”

Tweaking our presentation (Term 2 Week 3 - 5 April 2010)
Ran through our presentation for the first time. Our mentor felt that our presentation skills were satisfactory. However, at the end of it, we still had to ask…

What is still lacking from our presentation?

After a discussion with our mentor, we realized that we needed to show more substance; evidence of the research that we had done. This led to the creation of a slide on our initial findings after analyzing various works of children’s literature which had a heavy use of symbolism.

Furthermore, we saw the need to show how we were going to go about the project, how we analysed texts and formed conclusions. Therefore, we added a slide containing one of the poems we found in one of Shel Silverstein’s anthologies so kindly lent to us by our mentor. But why did we choose that specific poem, namely, Arrows? We believed that that specific poem was a clear example of how a simple text --- rather whimsical and simplistic on a surface level had a deeper meaning behind it. We did an analysis of the text and included it in a following slide. This would give a clearer picture into our thought processes.

What to include in the powerpoint slides (as suggested by our mentor): (Term 2 Week 2 - 30 March 2010)
• Objectives

Deciding the scope of our project: (Term 2 Week 1 - 23 March 2010)
Key questions we posed to ourselves before arriving at our decision…

What will our final product be? A collection of poetry? Alternatively, one single short story? Will each send out a completely different message?

Who is our target audience? Are we limiting this to just children? Can we extend our focus to older readers as well?

What are we researching for? Linguistic style, structure, symbolism, what effect illustrations have?

What texts do we base our final product on? Some suggestions from our mentor...