The Wolves in the Walls is a book written by Neil Gaiman that follows a little girl named Lucy when she thinks she’s hearing wolves in the walls, and her family won’t believe her. Eventually, the wolves break out of the walls and chase the family out, and then they chase Lucy and her family out of their home. Then, as a group, her family decides to climb into the walls and take their home back from the wolves.

This book has been made into a virtual reality game where you follow Lucy through the story and help the family fight off the wolves. We got to go to the Design Lab with Ryan McKenzie and experience the story ourselves. It was such an amazing experience to be in a story that I have read. We were supposed to go to Gordon Terrace to teach the lesson with grade 5’s but unfortunately I was super sick that day so I didn’t get to attend.

When I got to go to the District Resource Center to use the Virtual Reality set with The Wolves in the Walls. I got to experience story in a whole new way that allowed me to really empathize with the characters in the story and deeper interpret what they could have been feeling during different times. I also found that after being in the story myself, I was able to better understand the message that the author was trying to convey of what it can feel like to struggle with anxiety and OCD.

When I was thinking about how I could potentially bring this into my practicum class so that I could still get the experince of using Virtual Reality in a classroom. I came up iwht the idea of weaving it ino my presepctive unit for grade 5 english. I am starting the unit with using three different stories that involve a little girl and a wolf: Little Red Riding Hood by  Cottage Door Press (Editor), Honestly, Red Riding Hood Was Rotten!: The Story of Little Red Riding Hood as Told by the Wolf  by Trisha Speed Shaskan, and The Girl And The Wolf by Katherena Vermette. I realized that The Wolves in the Walls matched with my theme and could be a great fourth perspective where the girl wins over the wolves. So I am going to bring in the Wolves in the Walls into my unit to help bring in a different perspective for students all on their own. This will give students a new perspective on story telling and how we can experience stories in all sorts of different ways.

I am going to use it as my third example before we go into the Indigenous perspective of the story. We are going to first read the story and then the next lesson, and my students are going to get to step into the story. I think this will be a meaningful way to make up for the in-situ that I missed while adding on to my practicum students’ learning experience.

When I started to think about bringing this into my practicum class, I wondered how it would align with the BC grade 5 English Language Arts curriculum. When I started looking more into it, I found that it aligned with the big idea that exploring stories and other texts helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world. Being immersed in the story gives my students the opportunity to make more connections with the story personally because they experienced it with Lucy. Not only will my students get to explore the story when they read it and we think about it as another story that is centered around a girl and a wolf and how the perspective shifts again, but they will get to experience it themselves. For the Curricular Competency, specifically with the way I am going to bring this book and experience into my classroom, I think there are two different pieces that fit: accessing information and ideas from a variety of sources and from prior knowledge to build understanding, and considering different purposes, audiences, and perspectives in exploring texts. Students will be reflecting on the first two stories we read that have a little girl and a wolf as the main characters, and how this book might fit in with these two books, as well as now looking at new perspectives that come from The Wolves in the Walls. Lastly, I think the content that works with this lesson is story/text: perspective and point of view. This is the main focus of content for my whole mini unit with perspective. The whole purpose of bringing the text through virtual reality is to have students experience the story themselves from a new perspective.