Lesson video

Hello everyone, it's Mr. Brown here with your English lesson and it's a really good one.

We're going to be generating lots of vocabulary.

So words today, and of course we'll need them in our writing.

So big lesson let's get going.

So, today's lesson, to generate vocabulary to describe a setting.

And it's the fourth lesson in our units.

In this lesson, you will need an exercise book or a piece of paper, a pencil, pen, something to write with and your brains, your creative brains.

Our agenda is to do a quick writing warmup.

We're going to then be choosing nouns to describe, and then generating adjectives to describe those nouns.

That's the process you go on when you're generating vocabulary.

But let's get warmed up fast.

And again, we are using our world-class knowledge.

It's so important.

You can't know these well enough.

You have to know them inside and out, nouns, a PPT, a person, place, or a thing.

Adjectives describing words, verbs doing or being words and adverbs described verbs.

They are the words that tell you how the verbs happened.

Often end in ly.

So what I've given you is this sentence.

I'll read it for you now, Mr. Brown searched vigorously through his tall, packed wardrobe for a shirt, but sadly sighed when he couldn't find one.

Tough time to Mr. Brown.

What I want you to do, is I want you to have a look through and see if you can hunt down the nouns, the adjectives, the verbs, and the adverbs.

Put them in four different parts.

So I reckon the best thing to do is for your piece of paper, cut them into four pieces by doing a line down the middle and a line across that way.

So a vertical line and a horizontal line, and then label each quarter of your page with noun, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and then sort through the sentence, okay? Pause the lesson, it's over to you now.

Off you go.

Welcome back, let's see how you got on.

So we have nouns, Mr. Brown, wardrobe and shirt, I've just put Mr. Brown and wardrobe in my box, but you could have had shirt as well.

They are person Mr. Brown, place, no places, but things, wardrobe and shirts.

Adjectives, tall, packed, they are describing words.

What are they describing? The wardrobe, correct.

Well done if you've got that.

Verbs, searched and sighed, sighed is something you do and search, of course, is something you do.

And that means adverbs should be easy to spot because they often end in ly, L-Y, vigorously and sadly.

Well done, if you've got all of those brilliant work.

So describing a setting, We are back in the world of 'The Viewer,' the beautiful book written by Gary Crew and illustrated by Shaun Tan.

We're going to be describing a setting.

Here is the setting.

It's the picture we use from the opening of 'The Viewer.

' And that's what we'll be describing today.

Now, whenever you are describing something, you're trying to describe a setting in particular, you're trying to paint a picture in the reader's head and to do that you need to do it through, very carefully chosen vocabulary.

Right now I could be thinking of a beach, but I can't put that beach.

that's in my head into your head unless I choose the right words.

And that's exactly what we need to do here.

The reader won't have the benefit of these beautiful pictures that we have to use.

You will have to put this beautiful picture in the reader's head, through your detailed description.

And the first thing we do is to hunt the nouns Find the nouns in this picture.

So we know, first of all, what we going to describe.

So remember, a noun is a PPT, a person, place or thing.

The first one I spotted is the sky.

What I'd like you to do right now is pause the lesson and have a go at spotting any other nouns you can find.

I have got the sky, what other nouns are there? Off you go.

Okay, let's see how you got on.

Now, there are literally hundreds of different nouns in this picture.

You can't describe them all.

You have to choose the most important ones.

So what I'd like you to do now is just put a circle around any of the nouns that you've written down as ones that you like, "Yes, I've got to describe this.

I have to, this is definitely something the reader will need to have in their heads to be able to picture this setting." So have a quick go at that circle.

Maybe let's say five.

What are the five most important nouns that you're going to want to include in your setting description? Off you go.

And now let's see which nouns I think I'm going to include in my description.

So I said, the sky really important.

The sky in this picture is so key.

It paints the entire scene in this beautiful amber rich evening, thick, humid kind of colours.

And it's a really nice to create the atmosphere.

Okay, so we've hunted those nouns.

We are now ready to start selecting which ones we want.

So I have selected factories.

I think the factories are really interesting and really important in creating that industrial feel of this setting.

The boy, I think we have to describe him.

Now, I looked really closely at the picture and I think it definitely is a boy.

So, and I know that obviously, because I've read a bit more of the text, it is a boy, I can confirm that to you now.

Machinery, lots of mangled, twisted broker machinery with those exposed wires, I think is really interesting.

The car I think is worth describing this car looks like it's been there for years, just rusting away.

And the clock, I thought the clock was really interesting, I'd like to describe that.

One of the thing I want to just to flag with you briefly is the fact that we view this whole scene through a television screen.

It's a television, that's had its screen smashed through, and we're just using the frame of the television to look at everything.

Now, this is a really interesting choice by the illustrator, Shaun Tan, isn't it? Why do you think he's done this and bear in mind, the book is called 'The Viewer.

' Here's a little clue, pair of glasses there.

I can see also the real of it looks like a movie or a group of photographs.

It's all linked towards viewing something, isn't it? We are the viewer right now because we are looking into the television, at the boy.

Really clever and very purposeful.

And I think worth just mentioning and talking about, because it goes to show that nothing happens by chance.

This image has been so carefully constructed to have the effect on the reader.

And we've got to do the same thing, but instead of a beautiful picture like this, we are using our words instead.

Every word needs to be so carefully chosen.

Okay, so now we have our nouns, that we want to include in our description, we need to generate adjectives to describe them.

Nouns shouldn't really be on their own.

Factories, well, I can't picture the factories until you tell me exactly what they look like with adjectives.

The boy, I don't know if he's a short boy a tall boy, young boy, old boy, what are we talking about here? Until the adjectives are there to describe.

So let's start with the sky and I'm going to give you an example, but why don't you pause the lesson, have a go yourself just before you look at my adjectives.

Always interesting to see if you can come up with something more vivid and descriptive, than I can, you're definitely better writers than I am.

Okay, pause the lesson.

What adjectives can you come up with to describe the sky? Off you go.

Okay, let's see what I came up with and I bet you come up with similar or even better.

So the first adjective I came up with and I always, when I'm teaching younger children about adjectives, the first thing I always say to my year one and year two children is, just go for a colour.

Find the most descriptive colour you can think of that works as an adjective in this situation and get that in there because more often than not colour is actually a great adjectives.

And I've chosen Amber, Amber really, I think sums up, that colour of the sky.

Certainly, you know, you wouldn't want to use golden, would you? It's too positive, it's not that it's much murkier than that.

Murky, that's the next adjective I came up with, which means when something isn't clear, it's a bit kind of you might describe pond water as murky, if it was all kind of muddy.

Ominous, I love the word ominous.

Ominous means when something bad might be about to happen.

You know, you might be doing an ominous walk to the head teacher's office, If you were worried that you might be getting in trouble, it could be an ominous walk.

Now this guy is certainly ominous.

It feels to me that something's not right.

It doesn't feel positive.

It feels like something bad could be about to happen.

Cloud-scattered certainly has lots of clouds all over it not just a solid clear Amber sky, so clouds-scattered works really nicely.

Now what are like you to do is do exactly what I've just done and what you did for the sky, but this time for the other nouns in the setting.

We've got factories, the car, clock and the boy.

And you're only going to need to come up with two for each.

And I've actually done factories for you.

You might have more for factories, but I've given you filthy and towering cause they're so tall.

Can you pause the lesson and have a go for car, clock, boy, and see if you can add any extras to factories to go above and beyond.

Off you go.

Okay, welcome back.

Let's see what we came up with.

So, for car, we went for smashed and rusty.

If metal is old and is exposed to moisture and oxygen, it can rust, it becomes rusty.

And that's that kind of orange things, but you're wealthy on metal.

guy who starts to be like a kind of a, it's almost a bit like a scab that you might get on your knee.

Clock broken and circular, simple.

And the boy skinny and dark-haired I went for.

But remember, when we are using adjectives and nouns, the noun goes at the end.

So we would have filthy, towering factories, not factories, filthy, towering.

And don't forget, there is a comma that needs to go somewhere.

Can you put your just point to the screen? Where should it go? Yeah, you're right.

Of course it goes in between filthy and towering.

You use commas to separate your adjectives, make sure that you don't have two adjectives next to each other without a comma.

Cause when you do use two adjectives, you're fundamentally using the writing a list on you, a list of adjectives and anytime you write a list, you have commas in between the things on our list.

For example, if I went to the shops, I might buy strawberries, comma, oranges, comma, flower, comma, exactly.

It's exactly the same as adjectives.

Now to take your descriptions to the next level, you don't have to search for the nouns within the noun.

So first of all, we had our setting and then we found the nouns like the sky, the factories, et cetera.

We are now going to take the noun the sky and we are going to dive really deeply and see what nouns there are within the sky.

So we've got the clouds, the birds, some smoke, and the next step is to then add the adjectives for those nouns.

And I've done again, clouds for you.

And I've gone for wispy, when something is not big and chunky, it's kind of long streaks it's wispy.

and ash-coloured the colour of ash so if you've ever had a barbecue at home, you might've seen at the end of the barbecue, there's also ash in there.

It's kind of grey, black, or mixed up with a bit of white in there, ash-colored.

Can you have a go doing this for birds and for the smoke? Off you go.

Okay, I'm so interested to see what you came up with.

So for birds, what did you go for? Because I went for dark and circling, dark circling birds, and then for smoke, I went for thick and billowy.

Billowy I thought it was a really nice one, billow is a large big clouds of something.

So billowy describes the way that it's coming out of the chimney.

Okay, your job for today.

To take your descriptions to the next level and find the nouns within the nouns that you've already spotted.

For example, within factories, you can also see chimneys and scaffolding.

The noun is factories and the nouns within the noun are chimneys and scaffolding.

That's how we take our description to the next level.

I think in younger year groups, they would just describe the factories, but you are ready to start really being precise with your descriptions and finding the nouns within the nouns and then describing those too.

Once you have those nouns, can you generate adjectives to describe them? Okay, well done.

We've done our writing warm up.

We've chosen nouns to describe, and then we've generated adjectives to describe those nouns.

Congratulations, another fantastic lesson.

I will see you next time, take care.

Well done.