I love using some of the fabulous short films from Literacy Shed as a hook into writing.
This year, I did a narrative unit with my Year 5 class and they produced stunning pieces of writing so I thought I'd do a little run-down of what we did.
Before watching the film clip, we recapped the imagery techniques we have previously covered: simile, metaphor, personification.
This film is the perfect opportunity to describe something usually seen as ugly in a way that makes it appear beautiful. To start this off, I gave each child a picture of a scrapyard. They each revised their descriptive skills by trying to include every type in a paragraph to describe the rubbish tip. There were some wonderful ones, like this:
We watched the film through, pausing it at different points for the children to make comments and predictions. You can find it here or on You Tube (something about our school's security makes the Literacy Shed website very sluggish, so I often use their You Tube links. Also, this You Tube version has a beautiful piano score throughout.
We then watched this Sky advert for audio described programming. It's a wonderful advert to use and could be used to inspire all kinds of writing and artwork.
I made a transcript of this description and uploaded it to our school's shared drive. The children logged on to their laptops in pairs and saved a copy of the document to their own drive. Then, we watched Treasure once more. We essentially stole each sentence structure from the advertisement's description and changed it to describe the scrapyard in Treasure, thus creating the opening paragraph of our stories. Take a look at the beautiful paragraphs they produced:
Now that our introduction was completed (and stuck into books), we moved on to the main body. This was a lengthy but very simple and very successful process. I played a VERY short clip from the film - 1-3 seconds only. I then gave the children a particular sentence type to use or a specific thing to include. The children then worked in pairs to compose their sentence. Some types of sentence or things to included: open with a preposition, include an oxymoron or juxtaposition (I taught these as a new feature as we were doing this), open with two verbs (e.g. Rummaging and clattering, she...), start with a subordinate clause, include a relative clause etc. This was also a great way to embed some of our grammar work. As you can imagine, this takes a long time but really was worth it. Their writing was fantastic. Take a look at some of our paragraphs:
We have struggled in the past with our closing paragraphs. The children are inclined to rush at the end. To try to prevent this, I used the same technique I used at the start of our Shipwrecked stories - we watched the closing scene, in which the old lady in the story has created a magical scene from the scraps she has collected. We identified all of the different things we could see and each pair took one (e.g. the shadows on the walls, the light from the candle, the expression on her face) and wrote a 'stonking sentence' - the best sentence they could compose together, using all of their 'powers' and selecting which techniques to use. They wrote these sentences on strips of paper. I stuck these all to one A3 sheet and photocopied one each.
The children then looked at all of the sentences, decided which to use and in what order and edited them as they liked.
Here are a couple of their final paragraphs. You can see how they have used the same sentences differently:
I know that this is a very supported and guided way of writing, but they then wrote another story independently as an assessment. For this, I played them a few seconds of the film The Lighthouse and they selected a sentence type to include (from a list on our display) and they composed independently. Their stories were beautiful and they included lots of the techniques we had looked at, showing that they really could apply those skills.
Finally, here are some examples of our completed stories. Some are over a couple of pages so are in a couple of photographs. Don't miss the introduction - it's the typed paragraph at the start. Enjoy!
Hi! I'm Mrs P: passionate primary school teacher!