Squirrel Story Narrative Comprehension Assessment
Edilma Howard
The Squirrel Story Narrative Comprehension Assessment (NCA) was developed as an assessment of discourse-level oral narrative comprehension in young children. It is designed only to be used in conjunction with the Squirrel Story Narrative Assessment app or hard copy. The App or hard copy Squirrel Story Narrative assessment provide a profile around 6 key areas of narrative in young children (Gesture/nonverbal skills; Vocabulary; Listening and Attention skills; Levels of language used (syntax); Story structure; Story content).
The Squirrel Story Narrative Comprehension Assessment (NCA) was developed as an assessment of discourse-level oral narrative comprehension in young children. It was developed as part of doctoral research at Curtin University in Western Australia, which investigated oral inferential comprehension in young children with developmental language disorder (Dawes, 2017).
The doctoral thesis for which this assessment was developed is freely available from:
squirrel story narrative comprehension assessment
Download File › https://fenlaekdiaho.blogspot.com/?mu=2zVePP
"Finn the Flying Squirrel" is a tale about a squirrel named Finn who gains the ability to fly after consuming magical acorns. Excited by his newfound powers, Finn becomes reckless, using his flight to show off and outdo the other forest creatures, much to the concern of his best friend, Twig, a sparrow. After an encounter with an angry mother hawk leads to a crash landing, Finn realizes the value of using his gift responsibly. With Twig's unwavering support, Finn transforms from a carefree thrill-seeker into a forest hero, helping others and learning the true magic lies not in flying, but in the power of kindness and community.
The story is presented in a PDF file format. Accompanying it is a worksheet that comes in two formats: PDF and docx, allowing for modifications as needed. An answer key is also provided in an editable PDF format.
This work is original and personally written by me, albeit with significant assistance from a colleague who contributed to the concept art / cover picture and some story ideas. A great deal of inspiration for the narrative concepts came from the creative inputs of my students. I hope that you find these lessons useful and beneficial. I'm still learning, so please let me know if I can improve on anything.
Wow! I am shocked, though I guess I shouldn't be, to know that such a book is still in print. I had never heard of it--I only knew of captivity narratives as Early American texts that were very popular at the time they were published.
In other news, I went to grad school with Mark Rifkin and he's a friend of mine, so I'm so happy to see his name here.
--Veronica
Veronica,
Rifkin's book is terrific.
Last year, I started doing the research on Jemison but had set it aside to work on other projects. Yesterday, I got an email from a parent in Minnesota. Her fifth grade child is being assigned INDIAN CAPTIVE and she wanted to know if I had reviewed it. Her email prompted me to upload what I did, today.
Another excellent review. Obviously there are some very problematic passages in this book. Maybe it's time for another author to novelize this biography more accurately and sensitively.
Just on the subject of the Seneca reaction to Molly's golden hair: I can't speak for how things are with Native peoples or were in those days, but many blondes or redheads will tell you of just this kind of experience when visiting Asia or other places where such hair is rare. And of course African people face this too, among people unfamiliar with their hair texture.
My daughter had blonde curls when she was little. Many times we noticed tourists (Mainly Chinese) taking photographs of her. Sometimes they asked permission sometimes not. Once we were "mobbed" by a group of middle aged Chinese ladies on the ferry. Lucy was about three. They all wanted photographs with her! I didn't mind and My daughter enjoyed it. Anyway, that's definitely an experience lots of blondes have. My red haired sister got a lot of attention when she worked in China too.
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment regarding the passage found on page 174:
"That passage is deeply unsettling. It lets stand the idea that Native peoples were cruel, aggressive, and warlike, and that the White people who attacked them and encroached on their homelands were the ones who can teach love and sympathy."
As we know, Natives were utilizing the right of self-defense to counter an immediate threat of violence...and to help others appreciate this viewpoint, we need more Native voices to write from this perspective as literature is rife with this flawed misconception!
I teach in a school very near to where Mary Jemison lived (just south of Letchworth State Park). We don't have this book in our elementary library, but we do have one in the biography section of our MS/HS library (which I plan to weed). We have a more recent book about her called "The White," which I haven't read yet. I hope it's more accurate and less full of stereotypes.
A few points to consider:
Hair: Fascination with blond hair is still demonstrable today. What is different fascinates us.
When I taught 8th graders 20 years ago, there was a girl with long, white-blonde wavy hair. My school was 90% Hispanic, so this was unusual. The Hispanic girl who sat behind her would stare at it all the time, and would occasionally touch it lightly. The blonde girl told me after class that this made her uncomfortable, so I took the other girl aside and told her that yes, the hair is lovely, but please don't touch it.
She told me her grandmother told her that touching blonde hair was good luck.
In Asia, blonde tourists sometimes find themselves the center of attention.
So this isn't a stereotype of Native Americans, it's a common HUMAN reaction to something new.
"Indian Stoicism": In a lot of hunter-gatherer, pastoral and agrarian societies, complaining is viewed as a useless activity, so it is not encouraged. It probably wasn't encouraged much in colonial America, either. This may or may not qualify as a "stereotype," but in one aspect of children's literature, part of growing up is dealing with reality and not complaining so much. IMO, this should be encouraged by all cultures. In the book it shows that she is expanding upon her set of values and learning from others.
Compassion for the turkey: OK, now THIS is ridiculous, and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment!
I think Lenski was trying to show children that we can all learn from each other, and all cultures have much to offer (she wrote prolifically about children from all cultures in the USA). In that mission I think she succeeded, with some obvious flaws. Remember, too, it was written in 1948--- a time of much less cultural awareness---the year New Mexico finally granted Native Americans the right to vote.
I read this book as a child back in the 1960s, and I didn't remember the turkey thing at all. What I do remember is that it helped fuel a lifelong interest in Native Americans and made me want to learn as much as I could. I am not of direct Native ancestry that I am aware of, but in my family tree there are marriages to Algonquin and Lumbee people. The curiosity became a powerful part of my life as a person, an American, and a history teacher.
I think this book can be used in the classroom if it is done carefully, and in the larger context of cultural respect.
Stereotypes and outright mistakes should be pointed out and discussed, but don't dismiss this book. It was the only one of its kind for many, many years.
There are a few things going on here:
1) I find it interesting that with all these examples of the fetishization of blonde hair, not one of them is of any actual Native Americans. You can't just generalize from one group of dark-haired people to another and claim it's a natural "human" reaction. We're also talking about a group of people who would not have been saturated with Western European beauty ideals, remember, unlike people living in the Hollywood-dominated globalized cultures of today. It is just as human to find a physical characteristic with which one is not familiar to be freakish and repellant (see European assessments of black people, for instance). Adoration of blonde hair is not actually an innate human trait. Neither is adoration of difference. I have spent some time in Sweden, where I have literally met one other white woman who wasn't blonde, and no other white people with curly hair. Yet Swedes do not surround me, stroke my hair, talk about how beautiful it is, and name me after it.
More to the point, since Jemison did not have blonde hair, and did not recount such incidents, we must wonder why this reaction to blonde hair is such a significant part of Indian Captive. Why create such stuff out of whole cloth? What purpose is it serving? As Rifkin notes, this is about the racialization of difference, the creation of race as the key factor in Jemison's interactions with the Seneca, rather than nationhood, sovereignty, land, etc.. And in this case, the white preoccupation with race is being put in the mouths and hands of the Seneca--classic projection--in a way that naturalizes white beauty ideals by portraying them as universal.
2) Stoicism is not being portrayed in this book as "part of growing up." It is being portrayed as "becoming like an Indian." If it Lenski had portrayed it as a familiar value/trait of adulthood to Mary--if Mary had thought something like "Maybe this is what Pa meant when he said being adult was hard," it would not be a racist stereotype. But the stereotype of the stoic Indian, silent in the face of suffering, was old by the time Barrie used it for Tiger Lily in Peter Pan.
3) A book that was singular in the 1940s and OK in the 1960s is not necessarily acceptable in the twenty-teens. There are now plenty of other books available to non-Native children to interest them in the many Native cultures of America. There's no need to continue to highlight one that is inaccurate and contains such stereotypes.
--Veronica