Read for a Variety of Purposes

Task:

• Explore one or more of the following texts below

• How would you use your chosen text(s) to generate discussion and spark interest?

Click on the text(s) of your choice below

Background to each text:

The Call is set in an alternate Ireland. Having contracted polio at a young age, Nessa Doherty has been left with a permanent disability. Having learned the terrible truth about the Call, she becomes a student at Boyle Survival College. Here she and her friends must now train for the fight of their lives. Only one-in-ten have a chance of getting through the terrifying ordeal alive.  

The Poet X is a verse novel set in New York. Narrated poetically from the perspective of 15 year old Xiomara as she struggles with the unwanted attention her body draws and the pressures that society and religion place on her as she tries to find her voice and her own identity. She has learnt quickly to fight fiercely with her fists but still feels she goes unheard, until she finds Slam Poetry as an outlet to express herself.   

Hombre is a Western. John Russell has been raised as an Apache. Now he’s on his way to live as a white man. But when the stagecoach passengers learn who he is, they want nothing to do with him. That is, until outlaws ride down on them and they must rely on Russell’s guns and his ability to lead them out of the desert. He can’t ride with them but they must walk with him or die...  

Kindertransport  is about one woman's struggle to come to terms with her past. Brutally separated from her German Jewish parents at the age of nine, Eva is brought to England with the promise of a new life... Between 1939 until the outbreak of World War II, nearly 10,000 Jewish children were taken from their families in Nazi-occupied Germany and sent to live with foster families in Britain. Kindertransport, imagines the fate of one such child.

Alike is a short film directed by Daniel Martínez Lara & Rafa Cano Méndez . In a busy life, Copi is a father who tries to teach the right way to his son, Paste. But - What is the correct path? Is there room for creativity?

Fox is an ode to the power of imagination in healing. Leanne O'Sullivan is an Irish poet from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. Her husband's recovery from a serious brain injury was aided in his imagining and speaking to animals. “It’s putting language around something that seemed to be inarticulate.” She has won many awards including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2010.