Lesson video

Hello everyone, and welcome to English.

My name is Ms Weber, and I'm going to be teaching you English for the next five lessons.

I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself before we started.

So I thought, should I have this hat because this hat is my favourite team.

Or should I wear this scarf because this scarf gives you the name also of my favourite rugby team.

But then I thought no, don't worry about all of those things.

I'll just tell you.

I love English.

But I also love sports and my favourite sport is rugby.

My favourite team is the Springboks.

So I spend lots of time following rugby and following the Springboks and seeing how well they did.

But of course in lockdown, I wasn't able to do any of those things which was a little bit disappointing.

So I hope that you've managed to do some of the things that you enjoy normally during lockdown, but then also maybe you've learned to do something new.

And who knows, I might tell you about some of the things I learned to do over lockdown over the next five days.

So welcome to English.

It's good to meet you.

For today's lesson, all you will need is a pen or a pencil to write with, and paper or an exercise book to write in.

So please pause the video now to make sure that you have everything you need.

You may also want to clear away anything that might distract you while you're working, then when you're ready, press play to start the lesson.

Today we are going to meet a new poet.

Her name is Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

We're going to Start off by learning a little bit about her life because she had a most fascinating life.

Now, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born Elizabeth Barrett, and she was one of 11 children.

Yes, you heard that but 11 children.

Her mother died when she was quite young.

So she was mostly raised by her father.

Her father was a plantation owner and that meant that he kept slaves because they worked on the plantation.

Now, she didn't like the idea of owning slaves.

And she wasn't very happy about having to rely on her father.

So when she worked poetry as a young woman, she wrote a lot about freedom, especially for women, and for slaves.

She really was a bit of a rebel.

Now, because she struggled with ill health, she had an illness that lasted for a very long time when she was young, and it continued from childhood into early adulthood.

So it meant that even when she was growing up, she lived at home with her father.

But she didn't let the fact that she was struggling with illness stop her.

She was a very talented writer.

But she also, to make herself a better writer, read as much literature as she could from the past, as well as the time that she was living in, and to make sure that she could read some of the really old texts that she wanted to, she taught herself Latin and Greek.

This meant that even though she had a very restricted life, she was able to write poetry that was very powerful.

And her poetry caught the attention of a lot of famous writers.

Now, what I'd like you to do is to pause the video just here and to read the four statements that I've written about Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the screen for you.

Two of them are true, and two of them are not.

On your paper, I'd like you to write the letters A to D underneath each other, and next to each letter, I'd like you to write T if you think the statement is true, and F if you think it is false.

Remember, two are true and two are not.

When you have finished, move to the next slide, and then pause again so that you can check your answers.

Well done if you remembered that she was one of 10 children, that she was not one of 10 Children.

And so statement A is false.

Statement B is true because her father was a slave owner.

But even though her father was a slave owner, statement C is false because Barrett did not agree with owning slaves.

D is true because Barrett often wrote about freedom and women's rights.

So let's just recap, statement A is false.

Statement B is true.

Statement C is false, and statement D is true.

Now, press play and let's move on to the next slide.

Remember, I said that Elizabeth's poetry was read by many famous writers.

Now, one of the very famous writers who read her work was the man in this picture here.

His name is Robert Browning.

And if you are a good detective, you'd have noticed that the second half of her name is Browning.

So there's a clue about what's going to happen between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.

So when he read her work, he began to write letters to her.

And in the very first letter that he wrote, this is what he said, "I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart, and I love you too." Now, this was a really bold thing to write to a young woman, particularly one who had never met.

And Elizabeth wasn't sure that she believed him.

She replied and said, "Thank you very much.

But I'm not sure that my work is without fault, and if there are faults, you need to tell me what those are." But she did say in that same letter that she admired him and his work too.

And that was the start of the romantic adventure that continued for the rest of their lives.

Now you need to remember, they didn't have phones then.

So instead of sending text messages, they sent over 573 letters to each other over the space of a year.

That's right, 573.

They met five months after they'd sent the first letter.

And by then, they were madly in love with each other.

So now, I'd like you to pause the video again and I'd like you to read these four statements that I've written about Barrett Browning.

Now, you need to read them carefully, because one or two of them are a little bit tricky but I can tell you that only one of them is true.

So they're four statements, only one of them is true.

I'll read them to you.

Option one.

She was famous before Browning was.

Option two, Browning wrote her a love letter before he met her.

Option three, very few people were interested in her poems, and option four, Barret studied Latin and Greek at Eton.

So when you've chosen an option, either one, two, three or four, I want you to move to the next slide and then pause again so that you can check your answers.

And well done to those of you who got this one correct as well.

Browning wrote her a love letter before he met her.

That was pretty romantic.

Now, of course, they'd fallen in love and it was at this point that this story got really exciting, but also a little sad.

Because what happened was that Elizabeth parents father did not want her to marry Browning.

So she ran away.

She ran away and she married him and they went to live in Italy.

They ran away.

They left England and they went to live in Italy.

And sadly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father never spoke to her again.

Well, they lived together in Italy very happily and a few years after they got married, Barret Browning showed her husband for the first time some sonnets that she'd written when they had first started writing letters to each other.

Now, those sonnets were very personal.

They were really love letters, because they describe all her feelings about Browning.

Even when she wasn't so sure that he would love her because he was younger than her, and she was worried that he might really be writing to her only because he felt sorry for her because she was stuck at home.

And because she wasn't sure about what people would think of these sonnets, she published them secretly, and she called them sonnets from the Portuguese because she pretended that she had found Portuguese poems and translated them.

Now, you might ask why Portuguese? Why not Italian because they live in Italy.

Well, some people think that it was because her nickname that Browning had given her was that little Portuguese because she had very dark hair.

But even though she pretended that she translated the poems and that they weren't hers, many people soon realised that the sonnets were really about her and about Browning.

So there were 44 sonnets in the collection and they were all about her feelings when she was really confident about her love for Browning, when she was less confident about his love for her, 44 sonnets, and they were all about her love for Browning.

Now, I want you to turn to the next slide, and I want you to pause the video because I have a bit of a challenge for you.

On this screen, you will see three sentences.

But they've been scrambled.

All the words you need for each sentence are there and I've also given you a clue about the first word for each sentence because the first word for each sentence starts with an underlined capital letter.

So you know that the first word for sentence one is Barrett, the first word for sentence two is there, and the first word for sentence three is all.

Now, this is a bit of a challenge, but I'd like you to have a go and take a few minutes to unscramble the sentences and write them down on your page or in your book.

Don't forget about capital letters and full stops.

When you have finished pause the video again, so that you can check to see if you've managed to unscramble the answers.

Now this one was a bit harder.

So a very big well done to you if you've managed to unscramble these sentences successfully.

sentence number one, Barrett married Robert Browning, and they fled to Italy.

Barrett married Robert Browning and fled to Italy.

sentence number two.

There were 44 different love sonnets in her collection.

Sentence number three.

All were about her love for Browning.

Remember I said, there were 44 sonnets in the collection.

The most famous sonnet in the collection is sonnet 43.

It has been used in advertisements for perfume.

It's still used on the television these days.

It's seen as one of the best examples of poems that talk about your love for somebody.

Now what I thought I would do is I would show you what the poem actually looked like when it was in her notebook.

So this is a photograph of the poem taken from her notebook.

And this photograph can be found in the British online library along with other photographs of her and of Robert Browning.

So even though it's difficult for us to read, and if that was your handwriting, your teachers might say, not so easy to read.

This is what the poem looked like when Elizabeth Browning first wrote it, and you can see how she edited it because some of the words are scratched out and rewritten, she's written over some words, but I thought it was worth having a look at it.

Now we're not going to look at the whole poem because we're going to study a different one in our lessons together.

But we are going to look at some of the lines of the poem, just two lines, in fact, because they give us an idea of the power of Barrett Browning's feelings for her husband even before they were married, and also the power of her writing.

So let's have a look at two lines from the poem.

So the first line I'd like us to look at is, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

So when I look at that line, it sounds like she's asking a brand new question, but we need to remember that she wasn't actually speaking to Browning.

She was writing this at home and she was thinking about him.

But she starts off with a question as though she was speaking directly to him.

And then she proceeds to answer that question, how do I love thee? How much do I love you? Let me count the ways and the rest of the poem is a list of all the ways that she loves him.

And we're going to look at just one of the ways in which she says that she loves him.

She says, "I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach." Now, when we look at that line, it's a lot of things that we can think about because there's some things in there that are really important.

So she's describing that her love is as deep and as wide and as tall as it can possibly be.

In fact, it is so deep and so broad and so high, that you actually cannot see the end of it.

She says they're cheap.

It's close to infinity.

And what is interesting is that the way she's talking about her love for Browning is the way people used to talk about God's love for people.

And so she's doing something really brave here.

She's comparing her love for Browning to the way God loves people.

A love that's unending, a love that'S infinite, it's so big that you can't even measure it, Just as you can't measure how far your soul can reach.

Now, I'd like you to pause the video again Because I've written four statements about Barrett Browning for you to read.

Two of them are true and two of them or not.

So we've got four statements.

Two of them are true and two of them are not.

So you're again going to write A, B, C, D on your page in your book.

And next to it, you're going to write a T if it's true, and an F, if it's false.

So take some time, read through the statements, and then decide if they are true or false.

When you have finished, move to the next slide, and then pause again so that you can check your answers.

So let's have a go, shall we? Statement A, sonnet 43 is about love.

Yes, that's true.

Because all of a sudden, it's all about love.

Now, sentence B was a bit of a tricky one because it said, Barrett Browning is really speaking to Browning in the poem.

And we know that even though it sounds like she's speaking to him, he's not there.

She's really just thinking about her love for him and writing about her love for him in the poem, so statement B is false.

Statements C says, Barrett Browning says that she can measure her love for Browning.

And we know that she said, she can't measure her love for Browning, because you can't measure how far your soul can stretch.

Statement D.

Barrett Browning uses images normally used to describe God's love to describe her love.

And we know that that is true, because she says that her love is so deep and so broad and so high that you can't measure it.

And that was the language that people used to use to talk about the love of God.

So when you are finished, press play again and we are going to have another look at just one of those statements from the poem in a little more detail.

So remember we said that Barrett Browning said that she can't measure her love for Browning, which means that she loves sim immeasurably and immeasurably means that you cannot measure it.

So she loves him to the depth, to the breadth and to the height of her soul.

Now, this is a really important little quotation that we can use from the poem.

So we're going to just work on this again, we're going to practise going through it and you're going to write out this in your book, just to make sure that you can remember them when we go through.

So what I want you to do is to now pause the video, I want you to pause the video, and I want you to write these statements in your book, how powerfully Barrett Browning writes about her love and We've got to the D, to the breadth, to the H of her S, and word that starts with I, to describe her love for Browning.

So pause the video and write these statements on your page or in your exercise book.

Have a look here and you can see what you should have written and then you can make sure that you've also spelt the words correctly.

So you may want to pause the video again so you can check the spelling of the word on the screen and the spelling of the word in your book.

And when we've done this, you'll be ready to do the last exercise for the lesson which is where we take some time to think about Barrett Browning's writing.

So when you're ready, press play and we're going to come to the big question for today's lesson, and this is your chance to show off what you've learned.

So let's have a look at the question.

What have we learned today about the power of Barrett Browning's writing? What have we learned about the power of Barrett Browning's writing today? Now, the key word of this question is power.

So make sure that you keep your writing focused on answering the question by discussing how powerful she wrote and why.

And to help you, I have given you a way in which you can start your writing, and I've also included some key words.

So a way in which you can start your writing is that Barrett Browning was able to produce powerful writing because of her great talent and her study of other great literature and of other languages, because that helped her to have enough words to write really powerfully.

But of course, the other reason that her writing was so powerful was because she was writing about her personal feelings, her deep personal feelings for Robert Browning and that added to the power and the beauty of her poems. So what I'd like you to do now is to pause the video and to do this writing task.

What have we learned about the power of Barret Browning's writing today? I've given you the key words again.

Now, let's have a read through the answers.

So the first answer I have for you is a good answer.

Now, I don't want you to worry if your wording is not exactly the same as mine.

But what I want you to look for is if you've got the main ideas, if you've used the key words, so you could have used the key word as talent, or you may have used it as talented, you may have used the word as study or studied.

But you're looking for the keywords, because that's what helps you to make sure that you've actually answered the question.

So here's an example of a good answer.

Barrett was able to produce powerful writing because she was talented.

She also studied good literature and other languages.

Her writing was powerful because she was writing about her personal feelings for Browning.

So that is a good answer.

It's used all the key words, and it's answered the question.

But you may say, "That's okay, Miss, but I'd like to know what would make my answer even better." So here is an example of a better answer.

Taking the same ideas, it still uses all the key words, but the way it's written makes it a better answer.

Barrett Browning was able to produce powerful writing because of her great talent combined with her study of other writing.

The fact that her poems were written about her deep feelings for the man she loved, added to the power and beauty of her poems. Thank you for spending this time with me today.

Don't forget that if you'd like to, you can ask your parents or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and hashtag learn with Oak.

It was lovely to have you with me today and I look forward to seeing all of you tomorrow.

Goodbye.