The Shouting Girl – L1 Background Knowledge

The Book

The Shouting Girl

Written by Steven Huynh, illustrated by Gehenna Pham, published by Steven De GC

The poem follows a young girl who struggles to express herself calmly, often shouting when she feels frustrated or unheard. Through her journey, she learns to recognise and understand her emotions (AC9HPFP03, AC9HP2P03 – Foundation to Year 2, Health and Physical Education) and works to develop positive strategies for expressing her thoughts and feelings in respectful ways (AC9HPFP02, AC9HP2P02 – Foundation to Year 2, Health and Physical Education).

The story also encourages children to explore characters’ perspectives and emotional responses, fostering empathy (AC9HP2P01 – Health and Physical Education, Years 1 and 2). It helps them define safe and unsafe environments through interactions with friends in a classroom, establishing help-seeking strategies in such situations (AC9HP2P05 – Health and Physical Education, Years 1 and 2). Additionally, the book highlights how environments, such as a calm corner or designated green boxes, can be designed to support emotional regulation and meet classroom needs (AC9TDEFK01, AC9TDE2K01 – Foundation to Year 2, Design and Technologies).

With its poetic language and engaging illustrations, The Shouting Girl helps students understand how rhyme and rhythm create cohesion in poems. It also explores how words and images shape settings and characters, along with other literary features such as lists of three and similes.

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Resource creator

Steven Huynh

Subject

English Language and Literacy, Health and Physical Education,

Level

Year 2,

Description

This talk for reading lesson introduces The Shouting Girl and helps Year 2 students explore the Health and Physical Education theme of big feelings (AC9HP2P03), particularly anger. Through personal reflection, a video, and shared wonderings, students activate background knowledge to support their comprehension of the story.

Learning Intentions

• We are learning to build our background knowledge to help us comprehend a text.

Successful Criteria

• I can share experiences and thoughts about big feelings like anger.
• I can make predictions and questions about the story based on the cover.

Curriculum Alignment

AC9E2LY02 9.0 (English Language and Literacy Year 2): Use interaction skills when engaging with topics, actively listening to others, receiving instructions and extending own ideas, speaking appropriately, expressing and responding to opinions, making statements, and giving instructions

• exploring ways to comment on what others say, including using sentence starters such as “I like the way you …”, “I agree that …”, “I have a different thought …”, “I’d like to say something different …”
• demonstrating appropriate listening behaviours, responding to and paraphrasing a partner’s contribution to a discussion; for example, in think pair share activities
• asking relevant questions and making connections with personal experiences and the contributions of others
• understanding how to disagree or respectfully offer an alternative

AC9E2LY05 9.0 (English Language and Literacy Year 2): Use comprehension strategies such as visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising, monitoring and questioning to build literal and inferred meaning

• listening for specific information and providing key facts or points from an informative or persuasive text
• listening and responding to detailed instructions
• integrating information from print, images and prior knowledge to make supportable inferences
• identifying the main idea of a text
• predicting vocabulary that is likely to be in a text, based on the topic and the purpose of the text; for example, predicting that “station” and “arrive” would be in a text recounting a train journey
• using prior knowledge to make and confirm predictions when reading a text
• using graphic organisers to represent the connections between characters, order of events or sequence of information

AC9HP2P03 9.0 (Health and Physical Education Year 1,Year 2): Identify how different situations influence emotional responses

• recognising own emotions and demonstrating ways to manage how they express their emotions in different situations
• exploring self-regulation strategies to manage emotional responses
• identifying situations that may trigger strong emotional responses in themselves and others, and recognising the impact the responses can have on others
• identifying how someone might feel, think and act during an emergency through role-play and imaginative play
• predicting how a person or character might be feeling based on the words they use, their facial expressions and body language
• recognising how self and others are feeling in a range of situations

Materials

The Shouting Girl by Steven Huynh
Butcher’s paper or Wonderings page template
Markers or textas
Video: Why Do We Get Angry? | The Dr. Binocs Show – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clwt7iXF1Mg (start from 1:03)

Instructions

Warm-up

Ask: “Have you ever experienced big feelings before?”
Encourage students to share examples.
Guide the conversation toward anger with questions like:
- “What makes you feel angry?”
- “What does it feel like?”
Record student responses under a “I know” section on the Wonderings Page.

Activating Background Knowledge

Introduce the video: “We’re going to watch a short video that helps us understand anger and what it does to our bodies and brains.”
Play the video: Why Do We Get Angry? | The Dr. Binocs Show

After the video

Ask: “What did you learn about anger from the video?”
Record student responses under a “I notice” section on the Wonderings Page.

Book introduction

Show the cover of The Shouting Girl.
Ask students to describe the girl and what she might be doing next.
- What do you think is happening to the girl?
- What is she going to do?
- What do you think the story is all about?
Encourage students to brainstorm their ‘wonders’ based on the title and illustration.
Record student responses under a “I wonder” section on the Wonderings Page.

Activity – Wonderings Page

On butcher’s paper, write down students’ initial responses in the wonderings page.
Wrap up by going through the wonderings page as the whole class or as individual works (worksheet provided)

Extensions

Invite students to draw what anger feels like in their bodies (e.g. clenched fists, hot face).
Begin a class “Feelings Word Wall” with vocabulary from the video and story.

Downloads

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