Abstract

In the past two years a seeming plethora of books with the theme of war and peace have been published for children. It is necessary to provide time in classrooms for students to raise and interrogate issues raised in these books While conversations about texts are a starting point, ensuring that this dialogue is accountable and rigorous is just as fundamental. This paper will demonstrate strategies that support the modelling and explicit teaching that may be used to develop accountable talk. These strategies and examples of student talk will be described and examples given from work in classrooms. We describe how students learn to connect ideas about war within and between texts, through text to text, text to self and text to world connections.