Thematic Elements of One is One and All Alone by Nicholas Fisk and Possible Teaching Activities

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From the repertoire of short stories available to form 2 students, this paper will select a piece written by Nicholas Fisk, entitled One is One and All Alone. The story is about Trish, the main protagonist, living on a spaceship bound for Trion. There were no other adolescence of her peer but there were her father and several other adults on deck maintaining the spaceship. Trish got lonely pretty quick and decided to create a clone of herself to accompany her lonely journey to Trion. At first it was all butterflies and rainbows but later things got ugly and lead to a traged where Trish was thrown out of the spaceship by her clone, Clo. In the end, Clo enjoyed living her new life as Trish without being noticed by her Dad.
The central theme of the short story is very much related to young adults or teenagers in their early years of discovering themselves. The central theme is friendship and companionship. Generally, teenagers have a higher tendency to want to have many friends that they can hang out with. Not many teenagers choose the path of loneliness and isolation. They wanted to be accepted by their peers and would go the distance in order to be accepted into the respective peer groups. The main idea of selecting this theme of friendship and companionship is to highlight to the students that it is important to have friends that they can do the things that they enjoy together instead of being isolated and lonely. In fact, in the text itself, Trish was becoming lonely as she was the only child on a spaceship where her parents were too busy to spend time with her. She longs for companionship and friendship. In the end, she decided to ask the VoicePrinter (VP) to create a clone of herself to be her friend. This event also shows th...

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...lso need to write the name of theme that they just matched with the description. This activity is very simple and suitable for lower to intermediate levels of proficiency. A sample is also included in Appendix 2 which could be altered according to the students' needs. This activity is aimed at breaking the ice for the students and theme of the short story that they are going to learn.
Basically, the activities that are going to be conducted in class should tally with the approach that are going to be used in order to better capture the essence of the literary elements of the story. In the case of One is One and All Alone, the selected theme of friendship is suitable to be used with the personal growth model as it is very much relatable to the students at that age as they are personally going through the exact same situation with the characters in the short story.

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