imagining what happened to the the lost thing before Shaun found him (e.g. how did he get to the beach?). This book was adapted into a 15-minute animated short film in 2010, directed by Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann and narrated by Tim Minchin. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. [4] [5] [6] It was nominated for the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Identify aspects of literary texts that convey details or information about particular social, cultural or historical contexts (ACELT1608) This is a chapter from an English text book which offers a unit of work based on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. While the content would suit older students, there are many activities and lessons that can be adapted to a Year 7/8 study of The Lost Thing. This Reading Australia unit has utilised this text’s coverage of panel transitions in the Close study section.

What started out as an amusing, nonsensical story about a freak soon developed into a fable concerning serious social issues, with a rather ambiguous ending. I became quite interested in the idea of a creature or person who really did not come from anywhere, or have an existing relationship to anything, and was ‘just plain lost’ as one character puts it. I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of a teenage boy, that would represent how I might personally respond to this situation. The audio talks about the book in this video. Think of some questions that you would like to ask him: The cover of The Lost Thing reveals an image of the thing and its gormless minder standing lost and alone at the entry to a typical soulless inner-city underpass. An immediate visual allusion to Jeffrey Smart’s famous painting Cahill Expressway (1962), it depicts a similarly dislocated male in a business suit standing in much the same dislocated position. Tan’s message in alluding to the painting is immediate and undeniable: city dwellers are lost, immersed in an anonymous and careless landscape of monumental concrete, towering over and reducing them. Tan drives his cover message home with an easily missed line in fine print beneath the title: ‘A tale for those who have more important things to pay attention to’. The narrator’s compassion for the lost thing denies this in the telling, although he does admit, when the thing is safely home at the end, ‘Maybe there aren’t many lost things anymore. Or maybe I’ve just stopped noticing. Too busy doing other stuff I guess.’ He goes home to what the reader is led to believe is the more urgent business of classifying his ‘bottle-top collection’. GARY CREW is Australia’s most awarded author for children and young adults having won the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year four times – twice for his young adult novels and twice for his illustrated books.In the middle of the rope write the statement, “ The Lost Thing has a happy ending” and the words “Yes” and “No” at each end of the rope. Post-it notes (teachers wishing to employ digital learning tools will find Padlet a useful “virtual” board to assemble class responses).

Other artistic influences mentioned by Tan that relate more to the Utopia scene are those of Hieronymus Bosch and the Spanish Surrealists. A simple Google image search of Spanish Surrealists will provide plentiful images to give students a sense of the colour, vibrancy and the often bizarre subject matter of Surrealism; qualities that can also be seen in the Utopia image. One of the most famous works by Bosch is The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych depicting the Garden of Eden and Hell on the left and right panels, and the central panel involving people carousing with each other and animal figures in a strange landscape dotted with odd architecture. The link provided here is of a virtual tour of the expansive painting and it needs to be noted that there is adult content which some teachers may find unsuitable for Year 7/8 students. Adaptations This painting has been the inspiration for many Australian artists, and there is even a collection of short stories, all inspired by the painting. (The book is called Expressway.)The creature exists in contrast to the world it inhabits, being whimsical, purposeless, out-of-scale and apparently meaningless - all things that the bureaucracy cannot comprehend, and so it is not worthy of any attention. Being a curiosity is only effective if the populace is curious, and they aren’t, being always “too busy” doing more important things. This world is a bit steampunk. It’s full of contraptions that we don’t recognise (including the lost thing itself.) What do you think of the final image? Why does the story end like this? What does this image add to the story? Explain.

The unhappy ending is that this boy is an adult now and can hardly remember any of the amazing things he knew of as a child. RESONANCE Some stories subvert the trope. You might have some stoner dishing out advice that’s counterproductive. (E.g. Little Miss Sunshine.) A Panel Discussion guide (PDF, 159KB) is provided for students to be aware of conventions and expectations. If this is the students’ first attempt at panel discussions, it is advisable to identify and screen examples from the media. Some of these can include: The Footy Show, Q&A, The New Inventors, or Offsiders.

The Lost Thing

NSW Government – Ways of Viewing and Teaching Picture Books. This offers a concise and extensive glossary of visual literacy concepts. I liked Shaun, our main character. I liked to follow his point of view and way of helping the lost thing. He helped the lost thing until he found a place for it. Some people are too busy to even look at those things that are lost in life but he stopped to help this creature and gave us a magical short story.

Using these categories, students can identify other elements in the book that could symbolise something greater than the thing itself. Elements of construction: Activity imagining what happens in the “Utopian” world only glimpsed in the book (perhaps taking one of the things and making it the main character); This activity is intended for students to look closely at the images and simply observe before attempting any interpretations. It is suggested the process is modeled with a shared image and then be done individually with subsequent sharing done in groups.

This response to The Lost Thing will be the culmination of previous writing tasks that have given students opportunities to articulate their interpretations and understanding of theme. Panel discussions are ideal vehicles through which students demonstrate understandings and gain experience in engaging in literary discourse. The audience will also benefit from each panel discussion by listening to other interpretations and responses to The Lost Thing. Since the panel discussion requires students to synthesise knowledge and skills gained over previous lessons, extensive preparation time is not required. Even so, at the Year 7/8 level students may gain in confidence by having a practice run within their friendship groups. Pete is your stoner sage archetype who ‘has an opinion on everything’. (He seems a bit stoner because he puts ‘man’ at the ends of his sentence.) I’m thinking Harris Trinsky from Freaks and Geeks. TV Tropes calls this the Erudite Stoner. The idea that adults don’t pay enough attention once we monotropically become sophisticated workers with specialised skills is not new since the smartphone, in case you were wondering. It’s an old idea and I doubt it’s going anywhere soon. When the book is the central focus, the film allows students to consider the affordances offered by the printed version in comparison to the film adaptation. In other words, what does each mode allow (or disallow) in terms of storytelling and reader/viewer interactions?