Lesson video

Welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Mrs Crompton.

Before we begin our learning, let's make sure we have everything we need.

You will need a pen and paper.

Take a moment to make sure you cleared any distractions away and have everything you need at hand.

So what I am going to give you today is a different image.

Mix it up a little bit, but not something that's too different in terms of ideas.

So I want to be able to pin together all of the thinking that we've done across the week.

And you can see that I am going to select you an image of a train journey.

So write a description of a train journey as suggested by the image.

Remember what I said yesterday.

It's this idea of this being a stimulus image it's as suggested by and your imagination can come into play.

You don't have to describe the exact same train.

You can change the timeframe.

It can be an older train, a more modern train, et cetera.

Remember what we also discussed about thinking about where you are in relation to this description.

Are you a passenger on the train? Are you watching the train from the side of the track? What is your location? So as you come to this next screen, I would like you to follow the prompts.

Think about the five phases that we discussed yesterday.

The idea of developing a texture to your writing, and think about the box planning tools that we used.

I would suggest five to 10 minutes on this activity.

So that we're working through this thinking about bringing all of our learning together.

When you're ready.

Restart the video, and I will be there waiting for you with our next step.

Welcome back.

So for our next step, I want to share with you the opening of a passage from a novel by Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son.

And we're going to look at a train journey.

And in particular, as we are reading through, I want you to follow the instruction along the bottom of the screen, which is to consider the effect of the highlighted words and the methods that are being used.

I've picked various things out, and I will elaborate on those as we read.

As I'm doing so, please take notes as ideas.

So when we have stimulus paragraphs, they are little models.

They are style models that you can mimic in your own piece of writing.

When it comes to you writing your own opening paragraph, or you may wish to use another idea of your own.

But it's a suggestion with some elements that you can borrow as you move forward.

Okay.

So a way with a shriek, and a roar and a rattle from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flushing out into the Meadows for a moment mining in through the dump earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide, away with a shriek and a roar, and a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock, among objects close at hand, and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the traveller and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly within him.

Now I read right to the end because there was no full stop.

All the way through that opening.

Can we think about why that might be? yeah.

In order to create that sense of ongoing movement in the train.

And if I just go back to our image, we've got the blurring of the image and we want to try and capture that somehow in our own piece of writing the sense of movement.

Now it's quite a tricky thing to do to keep your writing controlled, but here we can see punctuation being used in a very deliberate way in order to create an impact.

Notice in shriek and roar and a rattle.

Not only do we have it repeated so that it generates a sense of sound and pattern within the piece, they are onomatopoeic words by nature, shriek, raw, rattle.

In orange, I've picked out some verbs.

Present participle verbs, things that create again, energy and action.

Burrowing and mining.

I would link together those two have a semantic field a connection, and they have this idea that the train is digging its way through the landscape.

It's burrowing, it's getting deeper and deeper inside the earth and sorts of mining its way through and creating a tunnel through carving the landscape apart.

It's interesting that this is perhaps Dickens commenting on the industrialization that was happening during Victorian times.

that it's got this really particular image of burrowing and mining.

Perhaps something unnatural appearing within that natural landscape.

Flashing, booming, bursting, create energy.

They create the excitement of new invention.

Trains would be both exciting and also a little bit disturbing in terms of the impact they're having on the world around them.

But ultimately I suspect when they first appeared, everybody was really excited to be able to travel in this way.

And things are flashing by there's lots of noise.

Things are bursting.

The colours are bursting.

Imagine the landscape again from the window, everything is just whizzing past you.

Okay.

So we've got flashing, booming, bursting.

Deliberate choices of vocabulary, very precise choices.

Shriek, roar, rattle, I told you previously has that onomatopoeic effect, but it also is a cohesive device.

By repeating it, it generates the idea of a repetition of a rhythm.

And the train on the track does have quite a repetitive sound.

And finally, I've picked out a little bit of alliteration in the phrase, deceitful distance.

I thought that was a really nice image.

This idea that as you're on the train, it looks like you're getting closer, but everything's not quite where it looks from the perspective of the traveller on the train and distance is deceitful.

Your vision is blurred.

Your sense of where you are is twisted and deceitful almost makes it sound as though it's deliberately been done by the landscape.

It's not allowing the train to conquer it.

And it is deliberately moving itself as the train tries to get closer.

So I quite liked this idea of it's almost like battle between the landscape and the train that seems to be being suggested in Charles Dickens passage.

You may wish to reread this and just go back and have a look at some of those ideas.

But there are a few features that we can pick out aren't there? The use of repetition, the use of onomatopoeia, the use of a very slight amounts of alliteration for deliberate effect and this idea of trying to use the verbs to suggest the energy of the movement of the train.

Okay.

Over to you.

What I would like you to do is to write your opening paragraph, and I'm going to give you a suggestion of 10 minutes to write this opening paragraph.

I want you to decide on your perspective.

Where are you on the train? And I want you to think about the precision of your vocabulary.

In a moment, you will see again, a repetition of the precise vocabulary reminder that we had last lesson, as well as a repeat of the image.

Once you gets to the repeat of the image, pause, and then restart again when you are ready.

Welcome back everyone.

So, our next step is going to be to create a zoomed in paragraph.

And I'm thinking that this could be the almost like the climactic moment.

So at the top of our little triangle that we're using to generate person energy, and I'm going to use this moment as a moment to create change in our piece of writing.

And in this piece, what I thought we could do is perhaps look at change coming through a change in weather.

And I've selected two images of rain on a windowpane.

So we've got the image of the glass, again, holding together our piece of writing and the passenger on the train potentially looking through.

This is where if you decided to be on the outside of the train, you might need to reposition yourself for this particular paragraph.

And we can work out the connections later, but let's work with this image.

So the pane of glass is there.

And looking through the pane of glass, the first image I've selected has quite vibrant colours, blurred, but bright.

And I was thinking a little bit about Rosabel's experience of looking through the bus when I selected this image and the way that she saw things as fairy palaces, that there was hope and promise on the other side.

And then I've selected another image that perhaps presents a very different feeling and emotion.

We've got a greyness to this image and a washing out.

So this could offer us the opposite emotions in terms of what we're feeling.

So you have two choices to make in your zoomed in paragraph.

What happens when you get to the zoomed in moment And we zoom into the view through the pane of the glass? Is it going to be going from warm from the bright colours into the grey, or do you just want to focus on one of those images as you move forward? You've got some design choices to make my advice to you though, is to think about colour imagery and to think about a change in feeling and a change in the moment.

Going to use weather as the vehicle.

In a moment we are going to get a repetition of the instructions, and then another opportunity to look at this screen.

So let's just clarify what we're doing.

You're now going to have 10 minutes to write your zoom paragraph.

Again, think about precision of Vocabulary We're not going to leave that behind.

I really want you to think about how you are going to name the colours.

Think about what you're seeing that is being obscured.

So we had fairy palaces in our Rosabel extract.

What is it that you can see? what images have been formed by the rain on the windowpane and how it's changing your vision.

And try using colour imagery as some sort of contrast technique within this paragraph.

The image will appear again for a moment you can flip between the two restart once you're ready and I will be waiting to work through the final step of our writing today.

Welcome back.

So we have written an opening.

You have now got a beautiful zoom paragraph where you've used a different deliberate technique.

And if you notice I'm matching up techniques with the moment and thinking about how the two connect, trying to be really selective.

I didn't ask you to put lots of onomatopoeia in again then just another feature to show our versatility as writers, but also to show progression within our writing.

The final thing that I want us to do is maybe to think about that soft falling of our action towards a conclusion, how we're going to wrap this up.

And I've selected an image of somebody looking through the glass.

Now you can be the person in this image.

You can take on that persona, or you can take on the persona you've already adopted, but there is some scope here.

Is that to use the person as a stimulus to add to this.

And it's very reminiscent of Rosabel's looking through the glass of the bus.

And I thought it was quite a nice image.

What is she thinking about? And in particular, I want us to generate the inside outside perspective and sort of lead into those big picture ideas.

So the big question we have to ask is if we're going to use the window, if we're going to use the glass.

What are we going to have it as a symbol of? In terms of the Inman piece and the Rosabel piece, the glass is a barrier, but equally we could flip that and the glass could represent protection.

So, your big question this time is what is the glass going to do? Once you've decided whether it's protection or a barrier, think about the properties of glass we can see through it.

But yet we can't get through it.

That's again, a barrier type of idea.

Protection.

It's a thin pane, but it offers us some from respite from what's on the other side.

So start to think about that.

Glass is quite fragile.

Glass can shatter and break quite easily.

Could that be something we weave into our interpretation? So our next activity is to think about big picture ideas that we can generate with the properties of glass, deciding whether it's a barrier or a protective device at the heart of our decision.

And then building that out to think about the four conflicts or what conflict we may wish to communicate in this final piece.

Okay.

So 10 minutes to write your big picture paragraph might be a little bit longer.

If you want to do some working out, that's not a problem.

These are just guides.

And what we will then have are three different segments to our slow write this morning.

I'll show the image again.

Pause, take control, take your time, and think about what you want to say with this final image.

Welcome back everybody.

So we have done three segments of slow write.

And we've got three different parts.

Now it might be that they're not quite gelled together.

And this is where for your final activity.

I would like you to have a look at success criteria and keep this upon the screen and think about how you can blend together and make your piece completely cohesive.

It might be that you want to rewrite a section.

It might be that you want to make amendments, but by going through the different planning tools that we learned yesterday, we have produced a piece of writing.

We've applied it to a slightly different image, and we've also thought about our big picture interpretations.

So the final part of today is for you to self assess and also self edit and be a critique of your own writing.

Really unpack, explore, make amendments, get a different coloured pen, make those alterations.

This redrafting process is absolutely crucial.

And under a timed condition, you must always give yourselves that time at the end to make sure that what you wanted to achieve has been achieved.

To finish the learning for today.

You have a recap quiz to complete.

All that remains for me to say, is thank you for your focus and enjoy the rest of your learning today.