Lesson video

Welcome back to our unit on a memoir writing in which we're writing our own memoirs, our own life experiences.

Today is the last lesson of the unit and we're going to start by learning how to recreate strong and powerful emotions that we have had in our life through our words.

And then we're actually going to put all our memoir together so there's a lot to get started on.

You need a quiet space to work with no distractions, a pen and a piece of paper and if possible, all the pieces of writing you've written in as part of this unit so far in one place.

Press pause, get everything you need together and then let's get started.

And we've already written four chapters of our memoir so far so we're doing really well.

Back in lesson one, we described our surroundings in order to give a vivid picture of who we are.

Then we delve back into a past memory and brought that to life for the reader.

Then we described somebody important and last lesson I taught you how to create tension and suspense in your writing.

Today we're going to describe some really powerful emotions that we go through in our lives and then we're going to be putting up all our memoir pieces together into one long memoir piece.

But let's start with reviewing what we've already studied.

You've got three questions here.

I'd like you to press pause and answer them now.

And when you're ready, let's check your work.

What is memoir? It's a piece of writing written from real past experience.

What is imagery and why is it so important to use when we write? Well, well done if you remembered that imagery is when you use words to create pictures and it's so important because it allows readers to visualise what is being described.

It is especially important to memoirs because it lets all of our readers see what's in our memories and our imaginations.

There's three other techniques we've studied that make writing powerful.

Well we've studied sensory language.

What we incorporate all our different senses.

Repetition, flashback when we jumped back in time and a cliffhanger when we leave the readers wanting to know more.

Next I've got six statements here, but some of them are false.

Press pause and identify whether they are true or false please.

And mark your work, number one, you should base your memoir writing on your past experiences, that is absolutely true.

You should include lots of dialogue in memoir writing, false.

We've already seen that long lengthy speeches or conversations are less interesting than rich description.

All your sentences should be the same length that is false and all your paragraphs should be the same length, false.

We need to be showing we can vary both our sentence lengths and our paragraph lengths as we write.

You should check your tense carefully, true.

If you're in the present, make sure you're always in the present.

If you're writing in the past, make sure you're always in the past.

And six, flashbacks are when you jump forward in time, false, why is that false? Because flashbacks are when you jumped back in time.

So for today's lesson, I would like you to think of a time when you felt a strong emotion.

That can be any emotion, it can be a positive one or a negative one.

And I'm sure there's loads of times you can think of.

And we're going to read an example today of an amazing description of a powerful emotion in this book, "Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid.

It is a memoir.

It's also a coming of age story in which Annie John grows up from a child into an adult.

It's set in Antigua in the Caribbean and Annie experiences really strong feelings and emotions.

Now this is such a wonderful book and there is a whole unit on it, on Oak National Academy.

So if you're interested, do check that out as well.

So let's read the section in which Annie experiences a strong emotion.

As we read I want you to decide what is her strong emotion and how does she describe it? She says, in the year I turned 15, I felt more unhappy than I had ever imagined anyone could be.

It wasn't the unhappiness of wanting a new dress or the unhappiness of wanting to go to the cinema on a Sunday afternoon and not being allowed to do so, or the unhappiness of being unable to solve some mystery in geography or the unhappiness at causing my dearest friends some pain.

My unhappiness was something deep inside me and when I closed my eyes, I could even see it.

It sat somewhere, maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart, I could not exactly tell.

And it took the shape of a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs.

I would look at it and look at it until I had burned the cobwebs away, and then I would see that the ball was no bigger than a thimble, even though it weighed worlds.

If I had been asked, I would not have been able to say exactly how it was that I got that way.

It must have come on me like mist.

First I was in just a little mist and could see everything around me though not so clearly then I was completely covered up.

I could not even see my own hand stretched out in front of me.

So let's check your understanding.

You've got four questions here.

I'd like you to choose the correct option.

Hit pause now.

And check your work.

How is Annie feeling? She is clearly deeply unhappy in this section.

Number two, how old is she? She's 15 at this stage.

Number three, how does she describe the strong emotion? The answer is A, like a small black ball and because we're picturing it there, we can describe that as imagery.

And what weather does she use to describe how this unhappiness feels? She uses the mist that creeps up on her obscuring everything.

So we can see here that the writer is using incredible imagery to create a really powerful sense of her unhappiness.

And we can look at these images in a little bit more detail.

First, she says, it feels like a black ball covered in cobwebs.

And I think that gives an amazing sense of claustrophobia and suffocation that she feels trapped in it.

It's the size of a thimble.

It's really small, but it's very heavy.

And if it were the weather, it would be, as we've already seen the mist, creeping over her, covering up everything.

Now we can create imagery in the same way about different emotions.

Let's create similar imagery about anger this time.

It feels like what? Maybe it feels like a sharp blade.

It's the size of.

Perhaps it's the size of a forest fire consuming everything.

And if it were the weather, it would be, I think it would be thunder and lightning and electrical storm.

Now it's your turn.

I'm going to give you two emotions and you're going to create similar imagery for them.

The first one I would like you to create imagery for is joy and the second one is fear.

Press pause and write your imagery now.

Well done, once you've created your images, we're now going to put them in a piece of writing.

Now I'm going to describe my strong emotion of anger and a time that I felt pure anger.

I'm going to start off by describing the event and then I'm going to use it to describe the emotion.

Let's have a look at my example.

When I was 14, I witnessed a crime.

I was sat in a cafe with my grandmother, enjoying a cup of tea and a chat.

We were surrounded by busy tables, There were workers having a quick sandwich, families taking a break from some shopping and a few people studying on laptops over by the window.

Suddenly we heard a noise from the front as a man in a black motorcycle helmet burst through the door.

He took two strides in reach round to the front table and yanked a laptop out from underneath the girl who was walking on it.

In a blink of an eye, he was gone.

The girl was understandably upset and I felt a burning hot rage rise up through the soles of my feet.

How dare he take what was not rightfully his? How dare he scare and threaten? My sharp bladed fury stabbed me with the strength of 10 knives.

It grew to the size of a forest fire, and still I couldn't calm myself.

It thundered on long into the afternoon and each time I remembered it, the anger returned like hot bolts of lightning.

So you can see here I've described the event that provoked the emotion, and then I've used my rich imagery that I've already planned to describe that anger for the reader.

Now it's your turn.

I'd like you to choose either anger or joy or fear and you're going to write two paragraphs.

In your first paragraph I'd like you to describe the event that caused the strong emotion.

And then your second paragraph, I'd like you to describe that emotion using the imagery that we have planned.

You're going to be writing for about 10 to 15 minutes.

So press pause now.

Great job, everybody.

We've now written our chapter five of our memoir, so we can start putting it all together.

You'll remember our five chapters we've written so far and I've got mine here for you.

In chapter one, I described my surroundings and you might remember that I was squeezed into a really tight corner of the spare room with my cat under the table.

And that would introduce a nice impression of me.

Then in chapter two, I delved into an early memory, which was the first time I met my new baby sister in hospital when she was born.

Then in chapter three, I described a really important person in my life and this person was my former tutor and my maths teacher, Mr. Smith, who helped us all out massively.

And then in chapter four, I described a really tense moment where I remember being stuck in the park as it was getting dark and I was massively late home from school.

And in all of these, I tried to use really powerful imagery.

And then in my final chapter, I described my strong emotions from today, which is when I witnessed that crime and I felt that burning hot rage, like a sharp bladed knife.

So you've seen my example.

And now I'd like you to spend a bit of time putting your memoir together.

Firstly, you're going to need to give each chapter a title.

Then I'd like you to check for missing capital letters and full stops and trust me, there will be a few, somewhere in there in your memoir.

I'd like you to find at least three sentences to improve.

Perhaps you can improve the vocabulary or the punctuation or the imagery itself.

And if you'd like to, you might want to add other important moments from your life.

Perhaps change your memoir from a memoir five chapters to one with eight or nine.

Press pause and spend about 10 minutes, putting your memoir together now.

Now we want our memoir to feel finished at the end and so I'm going to teach you a little way to add a short conclusion to our memoir that brings the whole thing together.

To put the finishing touch on our memoir, we're going to add a cyclical structure.

What does this mean? A cyclical structure is when the ending echoes the opening because the ending is the same as the beginning in some way, it makes a circle so we can call it a cyclical structure.

So let's see a cyclical structure in action.

You'll remember our first extract we read, "I Capture the Castle" but do you remember where she was when she was writing her memoir? She was in the kitchen sink and that was her very first opening line.

She started with, I wrote this sitting in the kitchen sink.

So if we wanted to create a cyclical structure in our ending, we might end with something like, so here I am still sitting scrunched up in the kitchen sink.

My legs have gone to sleep and my arm is numb from so much writing, but this is my story.

At least one part of it.

Why is this a cyclical structure? Because we've echoed the beginning at the end, we've got the reference of the kitchen sink at the start and again at the end, the kitchen sink appears is a cyclical structure.

Again, let's have a go with this one in "Cider with Rosie." Do you remember how it began? You might remember it began with this.

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror, my life in the village began.

I would like you to write the ending to this memoir please just a few lines.

And in it, I'd like you to create a cyclical structure by echoing the words, bewilderment and terror at the end.

Press pause and write the ending now.

You might have written something like, if my memories start with bewilderment and terror they end with the opposite.

I'm grateful for the moments of chaotic joy that have led me to write this memoir.

Is it a cyclical structure? Yes, we've echoed the bewilderment and terror at the beginning at the end.

Check yours did you create a cyclical structure? And finally let's have a go with this example, "Lark" by Anthony McGowan started with that really powerful line.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

It was meant to be a stroll.

A lark.

I'd like you to choose a phrase from that opening sentence that you want to repeat in your ending and press pause, write the ending, incorporating a cyclical structure now.

So we've seen other examples and we've written them for the memoirs that we've read, but now we need to create one for our own memoir.

Look back at your piece of work and how did it open? What was the very first line or the very first paragraph of your first chapter? In it choose a phrase from it that you can return to in your closing paragraph.

And then as we've practised, write your closing paragraph incorporating a cyclical structure to finish your memoir.

Press pause and write your ending now.

Well, that is it.

We've finished the unit and we've finished our memoir.

I would love to see some of the results.

So if you'd like to please ask your parent or carer to share your work on social media, tagging @OakNational and #learnwithOak.

Well done everybody, we have finished the five lessons and we've come to the end of the unit.

And if you've been with me from the beginning, you will have written your entire memoir.

So you should feel incredibly proud of yourselves.

I have really enjoyed teaching you in this unit, and I really hope you do continue to learn with Oak.

In the meantime, do take the exit quiz because it will make sure that you remembered everything that you need to from this unit.

And I very much hope I will see you next time.

Bye bye.