Sentence Variety

I find it can be a little tricky to look at media consumption and journalism in the classroom these days. This isn't a comment on a lack of material - there's plenty that can be discussed - it's more a case of not necessarily wanting to politicise the room or (more precisely) not wanting to get waylaid by the partisan nature of today's media. 

In the lesson below I want to focus on writing skills and manipulation of language without students getting too fixated on the 'hot topics' these elements are invariably tied to. There are no doubt some great lessons that could focus on political metanarratives but in this case, when teaching Stage 5 (Year 9 in particular), I want to force a more laser-like focus onto the way things are said rather than what is being said.

It's a little cheesy and hokey, but the best way to do this is to invent a news story.

For a lesson on teaching sentence structure, we can start with this invented feature article extract:

Not really caring how people would react, controversial scientist Krayon Lewis published his research on a free website that could be accessed by anyone. He laughs in a mischievous way and I feel deeply uncomfortable. I want to go home. Who is this guy? Krayon is a botanical scientist yet he thinks about cars a lot. He recently drove from Melbourne to Brisbane.

"My research will revolutionise the world," he says confidently.

He picks up his research paper, looking around for an audience, and then reads aloud.

"Fuel made from orange peels are the future," he reads aloud.

No one is listening. I cringe when he laughs again. If this is his vision then I'm not sure how much attention he will get. Krayon keeps on laughing. The scientist will keep on cackling until I eventually leave the room. 

A printout of this extract can be found here.

Engaging with the piece

Read through the above extract with the students and then discuss sentence length with them. Where is the longest sentence? Where is the shortest? Ask students to use a highlighter to identify as many verbs as possible. 

After this has been done, introduce this PowerPoint. It takes students through the three different sentence types, models their construction, and prompts students to think about sentence diversity when writing. 

The PowerPoint presentation includes the following information:

Sentences: Using Variety

Slide 1. Sentence Types. 

There are three main kinds of sentences:

1. Simple sentences
2. Compound sentences
3. Complex sentences

In the next three slides you will see examples and explanations of each. Use these to come up with your own definitions and examples for each of the sentence types.

Slide 2. Simple Sentences.

A simple sentence is a single-clause sentence. 

A clause consists of just one verb.

The sentences here are all simple. 

Here are examples from the feature article:

• He recently drove from Melbourne to Brisbane.
• I want to go home.
• No one is listening.
• He laughs in a sinister way.
• Who is this guy?

These are simple sentences. This means they only have one verb. Where is the verb in each of the examples?

Slide 3. Compound Sentences.

Compound sentences are longer and have two independent clauses.

And, if, but, so yet, or, as - these are the connectives used to join clauses in compound sentences.

Here are some examples:

• Krayon is a botanical scientist yet he thinks about cars a lot.
• I cringe while he laughs again.
• He laughs in a mischievous way and I feel deeply uncomfortable.

These are compound sentences, which means they have two verbs and a connective. Where is the verb in each clause? And which part of the sentence is the connective?

Slide 4. Complex Sentences.

A complex sentence has multiple clauses that rely on each other.

The clauses are dependent on each other. This means that if you broke the sentence into simple sentences then only one of them would make sense as a sentence on its own, like this:

COMPLEX SENTENCE: "The scientist will keep on cackling until I eventually leave the room".

BROKEN INTO TWO SINGLE SENTENCES:

                The scientist will keep on cackling.

                Until I eventually leave the room.

If you read these two sentences completely on their own, which one would make more sense? Why?

Slide 5. Examples of Complex Sentences

There are lots of different kinds of complex sentences. Use the following to model your own complex sentence examples:

• Not really caring at all how people would react, controversial scientist Krayon Lewis published his research on a free website that could be accessed by anyone. 
• He picks up his research paper, looking around for an audience, and then reads aloud. 
• If this is his vision then I'm not sure how much attention he will get.

If we broke these up into separate clauses (and potentially removed any connectives), which clauses would work on their own as simple sentences?

Resources

Feature article extract - worksheet

Sentence Variety - powerpoint

After walking through the PowerPoint, students will be primed to use a variety of sentences in their own attempt to craft a feature article extract of a similar length. A second lesson could then prompt the class with a follow-up to the above extract in which Krayon Lewis is revisited one year later, or you can allow students to invent a story of their own devising.

Students can then swap stories with a peer and identify examples of each of the three sentence types. 

This resource was developed and adapted specifically for this blog. 

Author Mentors: Kate Veitch and Discursive Writing

This is the fourth and final part in a series on 'Author Mentors'. Each of these lessons utilise a short extract as a model to encourage student engagement in the same vein as the writing-focused modules of the NSW senior courses (Reading to Write in Year 11 and Craft of Writing in Year 12). In order, these have been:

• Context - Kurt Vonnegut
• Structure - Yuri Herrara
• Theme - Ellen Van Neerven

and now, as a means of promoting a more extended response:

• Discursive Writing - Kate Veitch

1. Using Authors to Create. The first thing to do here is to walk students through some broad steps for creating their own piece of writing. I will note here that I'm not too hung up on ensuring that the writing is 'discursive' per se, this part of the lesson is just about prompting some thinking and eliciting a response. In using a model text to create their own piece of writing, students should consider each of the following:

• Inspiration: An essential step with using any text as a model for one's writing is to read the text and examine the way that the author writes.
• Construction: The next step is for the student to craft their own writing in a similar fashion to the author (our mileage may vary here as it depends on what aspect of the author's work we choose to focus on).
• Imitation: The student looks at connecting their own writing to an author's and developing an awareness of similarity or areas of inspiration.
• Reflection: The final stage of this process is to reflect and use correct terminology while explaining how one's own writing works, and integrating an awareness of the previous steps.

Now that students have an idea of what they can do, practise with a short stimulus as a mini-lesson. I like this quote from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

Students use the stimulus to do a miniature version of the Inspiration, Construction, Imitation, Reflection schema from above. Instructions follow:

Read the sentence above, craft your own line of description in the same way, describe which parts are similar, and reflect on how the sentence works. 

We're not looking for a long or especially creative piece here. A student who is adept at creative writing does not necessarily need this level of scaffolding. We're looking, however, at ways in which we can work with all Year 10 students - which includes students who may not be confident with composition and reflection. By reducing the task to a single sentence and scaffolding it, we allow such students the opportunity to walk through the process with guidance and to learn exactly what they'll need to do when they eventually get to Year 12. 

2. Extract - First Impressions. Now we'll look at an extract from a great non-fiction essay by Kate Veitch called 'Small Eye'. In NSW English parlance, this could be called 'discursive' writing. 

• 'Small Eye' extract.

We'll then contextualise the piece by starting with some general questions that ensure students have a grounded understanding of what they're looking at. Here are four such questions:

1. What is the text about?
2. What motif appears throughout the text?
3. How does this connect to the theme of the text?
4. Find one phrase/word choice with positive connotations and one phrase/word choice with negative connotations.

3. Explanation - Non-Fiction or 'Discursive' Writing. This is as good as any opportunity to introduce students to discursive writing. In giving an introductory overview of this genre of writing, we'll outline just a few key features rather than going too in-depth. I would start with:

• Written from the writer's personal perspective (first person point-of-view)
• Focuses on a subject or topic that the writer wants to discuss.
• Use of anecdotes, facts, history, humour to entertain and educate the reader.

Students then use the above as a guide to brainstorm the ways in which 'Small Eye' fits the description of discursive writing. 

4. Examining the Text. In continuing what is essentially the 'inspiration' stage, it's useful to now get students to look more closely at the text to consider how each element is used by Veitch with specific purpose. A worksheet is included here:

• Examining 'Small Eye'. 

Students work through the examples to identify and explain each of the techniques/non-fiction devices used. This includes:

• Adverbs, Ellipsis, Humour, Word Choice: How does the author control the way the reader feels about the text?
• Anecdotes: How do the little stories told by the author add detail to their ideas?
• Epigraph: How does the introductory quote make the theme clearer to the reader?
• Logos: In what way are facts figures, and/or logic used to make the writing more convincing?
• Repetition: In what way does the repeating of ideas or words help to tie the text together?

5. Construct and Imitate. Students should now have some preparatory knowledge that allows them to embark upon their own piece of writing with a similar theme. Provide some images along with the instructions below (two stimulus images are included in the PowerPoint at the end of this blog). I will mention here that, at this point, the 'lesson' may stretch into multiple lessons. 

Create your own piece of personal non-fiction writing. You must:

• Write 300-500 words
• Use at least one of the images as a thematic prompt - what can you say about one (or both) of these things? [Note: One image prompts discussion of travel, the other photography]
• Use 2-3 of the techniques featured in the Examining 'Small Eye' worksheet from the previous part of the lesson. 

6. Reflection. With the growing emphasis on 'reflecting' on one's own composition that has arisen over the last two decades in the Australian curriculum and NSW syllabuses, it becomes necessary to explicitly teach this as part of the compositional process. In effect, it's basically just an integrated way of getting students to engage in analysis - albeit focused on their own writing. 

Step 1. Examine Your Writing. Highlight and annotate parts of your text that might show:

• Where you have taken inspiration from Kate Veitch's 'Small Eye'.
• Where you have used techniques such as: similes, metaphors, motifs, anecdotes, allusion, alliteration, imagery, effective verbs, carefully-chosen adverbs, etc. 
• Where you have described things.
• Where you spoke really clearly about the main idea.

Step 2. Explain Your Writing. Write a paragraph 'reflecting' on one aspect of your writing. You can do this by following this formula:

1. Introduce the example you are talking about.
2. Quote the example.
3. Identify the reason why it was highlighted during your annotation.
4. Explain why or how you used this example. 

And there you have it. Some or all of the above might seem too explicit but I really do think there are a lot of students in Year 9 or 10 who need to be shown exactly what it is we're looking for, especially as we live in a society that increasingly swims in a stream of online data that can leave the younger generation feeling a bit adrift when it comes to more traditional forms of writing. 

The Author Mentors sequence is designed to walk students back through the steps of analysis and composition. This is hopefully done in a way that leaves no stone unturned when it comes to a student's own comprehension of what it is that Year 12 requires from them in terms of composing their own imaginative or discursive writing. There's no harm in repeating things that students have already been taught, it's this sort of repetition that's so effective in Maths pedagogy and helps to build student automaticity. Creative writing is a hard ask for students who feel uncreative or (dare I say it) just aren't interested in creative writing and probably never will be. By breaking it down into constituent parts and using discrete extracts that reduce the cognitive demand of reading, we can hone in on explicitly teaching some key skills.

It all works as scaffolding. If we start in junior grades then it becomes easier to lift this scaffolding away for Years 11 and 12. 

The above lesson(s) can be found as a PowerPoint here.

Acknowledgement: The following material has been adapted and modified specifically for this blog. I would like to acknowledge some of my colleagues - Ashleigh Galea, Lauren Hage, Amra Winter - who helped develop some additional material not included here.   

Source Analysis: The Atlantic Slave Trade

One can't roll their sleeves up to work as a History teacher without feeling comfortable with source analysis. Over my years as a teacher I've come across many scaffolds and acronyms designed to help students with this historical skill, and I think it's fair to say there's no hard and fast hierarchy to which one works the best. Whether it's AMOUR, COMBAT, TOMACPRU, OPVL, IOP CAM, TADPOLE or something else, it doesn't really matter which one is used so long as the student understands why it's used and can remember what each letter stands for. 

It's also important for the teacher to feel confident about which one they teach and that they're consistent so students don't get overwhelmed with multiple acronyms. Also, even if they're taught just one acronym, it's important for students to understand that there are other alternatives out there in the pedagogical world. If this isn't mentioned then some students may believe that the one they've been taught must be the best one (or, worse, the only one) and this can cause issues if they later find themselves in front of another teacher or in another school where a different approach is taught. 

Me, personally? I can never remember acronyms and I find them restrictive. I always prefer to try and think about sources in the way that a historian does, which means that not every source offers the same types of information. Acronyms seem a little limited in this sense. 

There's also a question of depth when looking at sources and the need to differentiate for students who may not be able to initially engage with sources at higher levels. What I want is to see students working from identifying basic information up to being able to use a source as evidence in response to a question. So this involves a levelled scaffold. I don't make any claim to inventing this - it's a synthesis of all those who come before me and is essentially just my attempt to reorganise various methods into a common approach that works for me. Anyway, here it is:

• Level 1: Basics - who wrote the source, what's it about, when was it written, where was the source found, how was the source delivered at the time of publication, and why was it written? 

This is about looking at the source in it's simplest terms and comprehending it. The student needs to locate answers to the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the source, however, it should be made clear to them that not all of the questions are applicable all of the time. These questions (like every other part of this scaffold) are simply a range of prompts to promote engagement.

• Level 2: Questioning - what's the point of this source? What makes it significant in terms of how we understand the past? That is to say, why might this be an important source for modern people to see?

This part is about 'zooming out' and looking at the source holistically to determine a central thesis or purpose behind it. It also essentially encourages students to think about the historical concept of significance. Again, just responding to one of the prompts above would be enough.

• Level 3: Closer Analysis - who was the intended audience for this source at the time of writing? Who is the audience for the source now? Do we think this source conveys information about the time authentically and, depending on the answer, why or why not? What sort of biases can be recognised? 

This is where we start looking at the reliability of the source and gauging the level of bias. I think it's important to teach students that all sources are biased in some way or another, it's just a matter of determining what that bias is or why some information has been left out. Politics and postmodernism aside, the practical problem with considering some sources as objective is that it leads to some students simply saying that a source is "biased" or "not biased" and leaving it at that. If we want students to provide detailed analysis about the nature of a source's bias then we may need to take away the option of considering sources from a binary biased/unbiased point of view. 

• Level 4: Evaluation - how useful is the source in answering a key question? How can it be used to answer a question? How would a historian use this source in the course of their own research?

This final stage is often the hardest for some students to grapple with as it involves historical thinking and some degree of higher order thinking. Students need to consider the usefulness of a source but, if they don't have a historian's purpose established, this can be really difficult. Students therefore need to have a question in mind when they answer this part of the scaffold. In the absence of a teacher-supplied question, more advanced students can be asked to consider how this source is useful in conveying a syllabus dot point, or how a historian might use it in the pursuit of a particular agenda.

Lesson Idea: The Atlantic Slave Trade

I would preface the use of this source by telegraphing the use of racist language reflective of historical context. This helps students maintain historical distance from potentially distressing content and sets the tone for how we look at this sort of language in the classroom.

The previous described scaffold has worked well for me with all stages of high school history - it's just a matter of adjusting how students engage with each level of the scaffold and pitching the language at their age group. The scaffold can be modified to connect to a specific source and students can then work their way through it by examining the source four times, moving up a level each time. 

Here is an example that would work well with examining the Atlantic Slave Trade with a Year 9 or Year 10 class. 

1. Start by giving students a question. Here's the example:

Imagine you are a historian studying the question, "What was life like for slaves in America in the 19th century?"

2. This comes with a scaffold - Source Analysis Activity.

3. Work with students through a PowerPoint that guides their response to the Slave Trade source using the four different levels of questions. This can be found here - Source Analysis PowerPoint.

The source included is a primary source related to the sale of slaves. As teacher, you might want to work through responding to the source first so that you have a good idea of the range of answers that might be possible. Students are to complete their scaffold level by level while you work through the PowerPoint as a class.

As mentioned there are more than a handful of different approaches to source analysis. This is just one that works for me and you're welcome to try it too! 

Disclaimer: The above activity was compiled specifically for this blog. 

Scaffolding Paragraph Construction

If there's one thing I was never explicitly taught as an English student back in the 1990s, it was how to write an essay. Even in my time as a senior student, I don't remember ever being conscious of how to write one... I wrote them, of course, and I got good enough marks to justify my later life choices, but essay and paragraph structure weren't ever focused on in my days as a student. 

This presented me with a challenge when I became a teacher. The day I became an English teacher was the day when I first had to start thinking about how essays were written. I observed my fellow teachers and backwards-engineered A range student responses, learned about PEEL paragraphs for the first time and, a bit later, ALARM. I've since come across a range of acronyms that help to formularise and quantify the process of paragraph writing in English... PEAL, TEAL, PEEEL, ICAV, CLACEL, OREO. 

I don't begrudge any of these. Whatever works, right? I just don't have the experience of learning these as a student, and I think it's important for teachers to have such experiences to call upon. Being inside the learning process as student is very different to constructing it as teacher.

I've since tried my hand at writing in the aforementioned formulae for this precise reason, sometimes under fake student names so that I can get an honest appraisal from my teaching peers (a daunting process, let me tell you!). Thankfully, my essays have received appropriately high marks when I've done the 'fake student' thing, but I have to admit that I don't think I do my best writing in the context of using paragraph formulae and scaffolds. When I meet students who have an instinct for writing I encourage them to avoid squeezing themselves into the acronyms, at least as much as our system allows.

That's enough reflection for now. Below is a task that I wrote a couple of years ago while I was thinking about paragraph writing. I've since used it with Stage 5 classes (both Year 9 and Year 10) and it works pretty well. 

It relates to the documentary Blackfish and aims to familiarise students with the idea of supporting a concept statement with relevant examples and analysis. The task does not require students to come up with said examples and analysis as I wanted to explicitly and specifically hone in on the actual construction of the paragraph. As I've explained before on this blog, I think we sometimes get too open-ended as teachers and become afraid to show students exactly how things are done because we don't want to be seen as doing the work for them. Unfortunately, this approach can leave students completely in the dark and they can become unwilling to attempt tasks that they perceive as just too complex.

Here is my thinking:

• Academic paragraph writing is complex. It requires the synthesis of multiple skills - conceptualising, judicious selection of evidence, the ability to write sentences in a variety of structures, use of appropriate vocabulary in a high modality, use of a wide and subject-specific vocabulary (IE. Metalanguage), the use of a paragraph structure that makes internal sense whilst also operating within the wider context of an essay, and memorisation of detailed content that can be recalled in essay-writing contexts that may not allow for notes to be on hand.  
• In order to get students to even start doing the above, I need to remove some of those skills from the playing field. I need to zoom-in on just one or two things and make sure students are confident with these first, and I need to do it in a way where students have the ability and confidence to complete the task whilst also still learning new things (that zone of proximal development we're all familiar with from our university pedagogy days).
• In this particular task below, students are being taught TWO things - the ordering of information within a paragraph, and how to generate a concept based on two different examples from a text. 

The task:

1. Students are given this worksheet.
2. Students pick two pieces of evidence from the worksheet that they think are similar, or that they like the look of. Higher ability students can fill in details about the point being made by each piece of evidence.
3. Students think of something they could say that brings these two pieces of evidence together. What common idea is within them? How are they similar? What argument do they both support? This is then written onto the top of the sheet.
4. Students then write a paragraph that starts with the concept statement they have created and copy the two examples in after it. This is done under timed conditions (9 or 10 minutes for Year 9, 8 minutes for Year 10).

There are three things to watch for when students construct the paragraph. These are things we may take for granted, or things that have not been explicitly taught to students before.

• Make sure the students are putting their sentences one after the other in the paragraph. Some students will start a new line for every sentence which makes the paragraph look like three small separate paragraphs. It can mean a couple of things when students do this, the most worrying of which is that they may not think of all these separate sentences as being part of something cohesive that belongs together. Some students won't learn this through being told ahead of the task, they will need to physically write it wrong first and then have the teacher correct it in front of them in person. 
• The two examples will need some adjusted wording or a connective clause of some sort between them. EG. Additionally, In addition to this, A further example of this is, Moreover, etc. Not all students will instinctively know this, especially if they haven't done a lot of (or any) academic reading. 
• For students who have no trouble assembling the paragraph quickly and understanding all of the above, this could be the time where you introduce the idea of a linking sentence at the bottom that consolidates the concept of the overall paragraph and ties things back to a bigger idea (the thesis). Stronger English students will be able to do this quite well in Stage 5.  

Happy paragraphing!

Disclaimer: The above resource was created specifically for this blog in my own spare time. 

Documentary Techniques in Blackfish

Not a long blog today, just thought I'd share a resource that relates specifically to the film Blackfish and more generally to studying documentaries. It's something I would use with Stage 5 (Year 9 or 10)... I created it a couple of years ago and meant to put it on the blog but forgot in the chaos of 2020's pandemic. 

Anyway, it's a glossary activity that serves a dual purpose:

• It lets students express their understanding and/or learn about a range of techniques used in the construction of documentaries (you'll note the inclusion of anthropomorphism - this is because it's particular to Blackfish).
• The teacher can use this as an opportunity to gauge student understanding of a range of techniques that they may or may not have learned prior to this study. As teachers we often find ourselves teaching students that we might not have taught in previous years - these students no doubt have already been taught a range of techniques relevant to the study of English, but no two English teachers cover the exact same things so it's always useful to check-in and see what the students know.

Anyway, it's not a complex activity. Students are shown a range of definitions and must then match them to the technique names. 

1. Give students this worksheet. 
2. The teacher walks the students through this PowerPoint so they can see a range of definitions. Students are to write the definitions in on the worksheet where they think they fit.  
3. Students can then either A) Numerically order the techniques in order of familiarity, or B) Give each one a score out of 3 in terms of how familiar they are with them. 

The last step is important to teachers as it provides an opportunity for Assessment for Learning, and can help identify areas that will need introduction or reinforcement with the class. 

Disclaimer: All of the above resources were created specifically for this blog in my own spare time. 

Mise En Scene - The Sapphires

When teaching film there are a range of things that are considered essential in terms of metalanguage and key skills and understandings. The base understandings seem to be:

• Camera Angles
• Shot Sizes

And that's where it ends in terms of consistency. Each teacher, faculty, school tends to deviate from this point with their own idea of how and what should be taught in relation to film. You get things like the following, but it's by no means a prescriptive or universal list:

• Costuming
• Set design
• Editing
• Camera Movement
• Lighting
• Sound Design

Anyway, I'm not seeking to codify Film Studies for NSW schools in this blog post, I just think it's interesting that the approach can vary so much. Another major element in addition to the above list is, of course, mise en scene, and this is something that many teachers do indeed touch upon when teaching film. 

Here's a breakdown of how we could approach mise en scene in the classroom:

Mise en Scene

This is a word used to describe what a director decides to put into a shot. It includes everything - where characters are placed in a scene, what objects feature, how much of the environment can be seen, etc.

Mise en scene can determine power relationships between characters. By placing a character in the centre of the foreground it suggests that they are confident and in power, that they are in charge of the scene, or are important. In contrast, by placing a character in the margins of a scene, or in the background, it suggests that they are not important or without power over their own situation.

Most directors place great importance on mise en scene as it is an essential part of a film's visual language.

(The above summary can be found here as a worksheet with a rudimentary graphic to demonstrate the components - Mise en Scene notes.)

Examples

After students are familiarised or refreshed with the above, you can then look at some examples from The Sapphires (I think this would be a useful film to use with Year 10 for a range of reasons). First, I would look at a modelled response to a screenshot, and then I would ask students to write their own analysis of other shots. Ideally, this would then be linked to some of the themes the class would have looked at in an overall unit on Aboriginal-focused texts (things like cultural identity, experiences of racism, kinship, new experiences, etc.) and used to construct analytical paragraphs. 

Here's the first screenshot I would look at:

Here's the modelled analysis, in which the goal is to get students thinking about the steps towards analysis as much as the analysis itself, as this is something that higher order thinkers can sometimes fail to articulate (IE. Show your working!):

Observations:

1. Gail is placed in background against curtain, a little to the left.
2. She is partially obscured by out of focus figures in the audience, and Cynthia is blocked out completely.
3. The camera has been placed in a way so that the white pub audience is between the viewer and the protagonist.

Analysis: This suggests that Gail is not in a position of power. The out of focus audience makes the shot feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic, and symbolises the restrictions put on Indigenous people trying to perform in this era. Gail is also placed towards the back and to the left, suggesting that she is not of important to this environment (a pub filled with white people).

Here's the screenshots students would then analyse independently:

Here's some notes I made for the above screenshots that could be used to support teachers and students after they'd finished with the analysis section:

Observations:

1. Julie, Kay and Gail are all placed to the right side of the shot, sharing equal space with the environment.
2. All three figures are placed in the back of the shot with the camera at a slight low angle.
3. Julie's shadow is cast to her left as a fourth figure.

Analysis: The slight low angle places the three characters into a position of power (albeit a small one), and the fact that they are standing up against the door represents that they are in the process of being kicked out of the pub. They have been deliberately placed into the boundary of the shot to symbolise their exclusion from the establishment. The shadow could represent the dark, ugly nature of the situation, or even foreshadows the fourth member of the group still yet to appear.

Observations:

1. Kay and Gail enter into a room, the backs of their heads are placed in the foreground of the shot in close-up.
2. The rest of the room is filled with bodies moving about - some in the background, and one on either side of the frame (both are only partially visible).
3. Not all of the environment can be clearly seen.

Analysis: The lack of a close-up on the girls' faces means that the viewer's attention is focused elsewhere, and the number of people all engaged in various activities means that the viewer's focus is split numerous ways - representing the excitement of the party. The partially obscured figures on either side of the frame create a cramped feeling, giving the impression that the party is full of people. 

Observations:

1. The band is placed in the background of the shot but are brightly lit and spread across the entire frame.
2. The backs of heads are seen in the bottom foreground of the shot, in silhouette/shadow.
3. There are no walls on either side of the frame.

Analysis: The crowd is placed low enough in the frame for the viewer to still focus on the band in the background, and the lighting helps direct the viewer's attention in this way as well. The lack of walls/barriers on either side of the frame makes the environment seem more open / pleasant. The heads in the foreground give the impression of a large, engaged audience (compare/contrast to the audience in the modelled shot at the start of this exercise).

Observations:

1. The car is placed in the centre and foreground of the shot.
2. The camera is at a slight high angle and far enough away from the car for the car to only take up the lower half of the frame, meaning the environment is easily seen.
3. The building can be seen on all sides of the car, people have been placed on either side, and the vegetation is almost symmetrical.

Analysis: The viewer is encouraged to put themselves in the place of the car. It's placement in the shot suggests for the viewer to take on the perspective of the girls as they enter the hotel for the first time. The arrangement of the building and vegetation on all sides (and above) the car makes the character seem small in comparison to the environment, suggesting feels of awe and luxury that may connect to the hotel's immense size.

Observations:

1. Gail and Dave are placed in the centre and foreground, so close to the camera that they are slightly out of focus.
2. The camera is at a slight low angle, looking upwards at Gail's parents from between Gail and Dave.
3. Gail's parents are placed almost in the centre of the background looking down towards Gail and Dave, and are in focus. Gail's dad leans up against the post on his verandah. 

Analysis: The audience is put in Gail and Dave's shoes as they face Gail's parents as a couple for the first time. Gail's parents are placed in a position of power, standing higher up in the frame and looking down on Gail and Dave, symbolising the discomfort of the situation and the upper hand they hold in deciding whether they'll accept Dave into their family or not. The verandah takes up the entire background, suggesting its importance in this scene, and Gail's dad leans against the post - which represents that he is connected to this environment, that this is his land and his place. The camera is also focused on Gail's parents because it is their reaction that the viewer is waiting for. 

Here's the above as a worksheet that could be used: Mise en Scene Analysis.

Disclaimer: All the above resources have been created specifically for this blog in my own spare time.

Women on the Australian Home Front in WW1

Part of the NSW Stage 5 History syllabus (the 'Australians at War' study) includes a dot point highlighting the role of women in WWI and WWII. I was led down a rabbit hole while researching this for WWI in particular and came up with the following lesson, which seemed to work well with my class last week. 

Anyway, here's the lesson:

1. Start with a definition activity for the word 'home front'. I actually do this for nearly all of my classes - History and English alike; I feel that improving metalanguage and general vocabulary is one of the key building blocks for learning. There's a lot of research in literacy that suggests that the best way to teach a new word is to get the students to use it in context, so I simply chuck the word up on the board and tell students to put it into a sentence, any sentence that makes sense, and I try to walk around checking on individual students to see how they've gone. It's a good settling routine.

2. After reinforcing the idea of the home front and what it is, have the class contribute to the construction of a mindmap that covers the lives of pre-war women in Australia. Branches of this mindmap could include things such as:

• Division of labour - men worked, women ran the household. In poorer families, women helped with work. It was considered important to keep the father well-fed as he was the only 'working' parent a lot of the time. 
• Women were housewives and their workload was intense - nearly all food was made from scratch and lots of clothes were too. Discuss things like the lack of refrigerators and how this might impact on home life, what would happen if clothing ripped, what a washboard was, etc.
• Women were mothers - it was common in this era to have an average of 10 to 12 children.
• Women's rights - women had gained the right to vote, state by state, only quite recently. The last state that established the right for women to vote was in 1911, only 3 years before the war broke out. 

This can then pivot into a class discussion of how the above might have changed once all the men went off to war. How would women have been impacted by this? 

3. Organise a lottery =- students draw letters (A to L) out of a hat or box [you'll need to just write these onto little slips of paper]. Students then search for their corresponding description in the following document; The Role of Women in WWI. After finding out what 'their' role might have been as a woman in WW1-era Australia, students should read the accompanying detail and respond to the following questions:

4. The Role of Women in World War I

A. What role did you get?

B. What was your role in World War I?

C. How did your role come about?

D. How helpful do you think you were in comparison to the other roles that have been listed?

E. How appreciative do you think people in Australia were of you at the time?

F. If there was a war like WWI today, do you think you would be needed in the same way? Why or why not?

G. Create a poster that advertises your role's contribution or belief. 

The above questions start at the simple and then move into the evaluative and empathy-based, with explicit regard given to context, thus highlighting continuity and change over time. 

I didn't plan it this way but this activity was timed well to coincide with ANZAC Day!

We will remember them. 

Lest we forget. 

WWII Australian Home Front Map

Hello! Just a short blog today on material related to the Stage 5 'Australians at War' Depth Study. I was looking around for resources on Japanese attacks on Australia during WWII and couldn't really find a clear or free one that suited my purposes, so I put together the map above. 

It includes the following information:

• Japanese air raids. 
• Australian ships sunk.
• Major PoW camps. 
• PoW outbreaks.

There's also a worksheet that incorporates some questions alongside the map - download here. 

And a large, downloadable version of the map.

Charity and Change - Extract and Activity

Hello!

Today I wanted to share an extract and activity from a Stage 5-aimed drama text. This play, Charity and Change, is something I've been working on for a while and it's very exciting to now have it finished and in a published form. Here is a quick overview of the text's purpose before we look at the extract and an associated activity:

• Context - the characters and setting have been designed to be contemporary and familiar to Australian students in mixed-ability public high schools. 
• Practicality - a range of parts of varying sizes and difficulties have been included so a portion of the class can be engaged to read them aloud. 
• Content - the text touches on themes and ideas relevant to 21st century Australia; online bullying, whether people are 'good' or 'bad', and the differences between appearances and reality. 
  

The opening section of the first scene introduces most of the characters. In the classroom this becomes a good opportunity for students to learn who these characters are and the way they've been established within the play. 

Here's the extract: Act 1, Scene 1 Extract.

After reading through the play with a class, it can be useful to go back to the start again and look at ways in which students can reconstruct the text. One method of doing this is to storyboard and then film the first page of the text, which is where the above extract comes in. 

Students can use a scaffold to brainstorm their shot design, which can be found here: Storyboard Template.

This template includes five elements for each shot. Students should plan each of these elements ahead of filming so that they are forced to consider the way the shots are staged and edited together to support and/or form a working narrative. These elements are:

1. A box in which the shot can be roughly sketched. This helps visualise how it will look. 
2. Shot Size - extreme long shot, long shot, mid shot, close up, or extreme close up.
   
3. Angle - overhead angle, high angle, eye level angle, low angle, underneath angle, dutch angle.
4. Movement - will the camera be static? Or will it be moving, IE. Zooming in, zooming out, panning left, panning right, tracking, handheld?
5. Mise en scene - where will things be placed in the shot? Who is needed for the shot? This section can be useful if students struggle in particular with getting their sketching right.
   

After the planning is complete, have students negotiate in groups which storyboards they want to use and then let them at it. Students can have a lot of fun translating their storyboards into reality and it's also a great exercise in creative problem-solving, collaborative practice, and imaginative recreation.

The Plays 

The extract above is from a play called Charity and Change and is aimed at Years 9 and 10. A second play, Community and Family, is aimed at Year 10 and English Studies. This second play deals with themes related to leadership, homophobia, casual racism, and mental illness. The plays are both set within the same 'universe', a fictional school called Bexley Hill, and follows a cohort of characters across multiple years. Charity and Change features a group of Year 9 students and Community and Family, which has some overlapping characters, is set two years later with a group of Year 11 students. The plays can be read in any order and both texts come with in-built study guides too.

Single copies and class sets can be purchased through Five Senses Education.

Stand-Alone Lesson: Parents Just Don't Understand

The last few weeks have been challenging for just about everyone. As Term 1 wound down, and the era of COVID-19 descended upon education, teachers found themselves needing to adapt to online learning platforms as a substitute for face-to-face teaching.

I don't have enough time, space, or inclination to go into my experiences in moving to Google Classroom during the last three weeks. There have been some failures, some ongoing challenges, and (I hope) some small successes. I'm still feeling my way through it all and learning about what I do and don't like, what I think might work, and how I might force things to work.

Suffice to say, this is still a teething stage. As it is for many teachers.

During the transition stage at the end of Term 1 I created the following Junior lesson in order to test a few things out. It may or may not be useful in your context if you need to fill a lesson separate to your current scope and sequence.

Firstly, students will need to watch the following music video. This was chosen in response to some Year 8 students who love rap/hip-hop... do you know how difficult it is to find family-friendly rap music? Luckily Will Smith was on hand to help me out. 

As it's a music video it would be remiss to only cover the lyrical content so I provided the students with a worksheet that covered their comprehension in terms of both written and visual literacy. The use of the table format to project questions alongside the relevant parts of the text is an adaptation of the Cornell note-taking method and is part an ongoing effort I've been making to get my Year 8 and Year 9 students to internalise the annotation process.

There are two versions of the worksheet - one for Stage 4 and one for Stage 5.

Parents Just Don't Understand - Stage 4 (Year 8 version)

Parents Just Don't Understand - Stage 5 (Year 9 version)

Note that the Year 9 version includes a question comparing this song to a previous song the class had studied. This can be adapted to suit your context.

Galway Man: Stage 5 English

Hello and how are you? It feels like only yesterday that the 2019 school year was just starting and now here we are in Term 4. Before you know it, the last assessment tasks will be done and dusted, reports will be written, and students will start thinking about building forts in the woods and riding their BMXs down to the river (kids still spent their summer holidays doing that, right?)

In the last few weeks of Term 4 I usually find myself needing a few stand-alone lessons. It's important that these lessons don't feel like 'throw-away' content... when students cotton on that you don't attach value to what they're doing then they'll tend not to value it either. The antidote to this can be to work on the skills needed for ongoing success in English.

This lesson below is a Stage 5 activity that I usually use for Year 9 as part of a genre unit focused on creative writing. It can also double, however, as something that can be used to help students develop specialised literacy skills at any point in Stage 5 - for example, the ability to identify genre through recognition of common motifs and generic conventions used, the ability to monitor a text for adjectives and adjectival groups, and utilising comprehension skills to predict the direction a text will go in.

Context

Teaching Stage 5 English in a mixed ability classroom often means working with a broad range of students. Differentiated curriculum can take many forms when we teach and, perhaps most often, it tends to come into the classroom in a flexible rapid-response form via the teacher adapting to the fluctuating levels of ability exhibited by individual students. 

One of my favourite forms of differentiation is the the lesson planning process adapted from the Gagne model and used by GERRIC. This involves creating material that targets three separate tiers of ability within the classroom - mainstream material for the core of the class, adapted material for those who may be struggling to meet outcomes, and extension material for those who may be considered gifted. It's important to acknowledge here that 'extension' doesn't mean extra work, it should instead take the place of work undertaken by the main core of the class.

Another thing to acknowledge is that it's near impossible to differentiate every single lesson of work in this way as it essentially means doing three times the work. Instead, it's worth aiming to just do this every now and again so that you can assess what level your students are working at and evaluate how they cope with material that more specifically targets their ability level.

The Lesson: Galway Man

The crux of this lesson is a short horror story called Galway Man. This piece has been designed as something that should be suitable for a Year 9 class exhibiting a range of different abilities and behaviours.

What this means is - it's relatively short to allow for engagement of students who struggle with attention in the classroom, and it's written in a way to allow accessibility for students who may have reading levels as low as those typically encountered in Stage 3. It's important to push student reading levels by exposing them to material that will challenge them but this is something that should be done purposefully and not all the time. If we're looking to build things like vocabulary, sustained understanding via extensive comprehension of cohesion, or an ability to parse sophisticated sentence structures then, of course, we should be challenging students with texts beyond their usual reading scope. However, if we want to work on introducing students to other skills like understanding symbolism and imagery, or the ability to explain genre, then we need simply-constructed texts that can allow for these things to be the focus.

Resource: Galway Man - short story.

The Lesson: Pre-Reading

Before reading the text it might be worth doing a quick check of student understanding regarding the phenomenon of bog bodies as this is the main idea behind the 'horror' of the text. These bodies are human remains that have been accidentally preserved for thousands of years after being submerged in swampy peat-heavy marshland. Bog bodies tend to occur in Western Europe and date from the Bronze Age.

Resource: Pre-Reading - PowerPoint Presentation.

The Lesson: Post-Reading

Students can undertake one of the activity sheets after reading the short story. There are two ways to approach determining who does which sheet:

1. Hand out the three different levels of sheets according to which students you think fit into the 'core', 'adjusted', and 'extension' groupings of ability. If any students question why they can't have a different sheet then, by all means, let them have a go at the sheet they prefer. If they find it too easy then you've both learned something, if they find it too hard then at least they challenged themselves.
2. Let students pick the sheet they want to do - I usually place the sheets on a table underneath the whiteboard with arrows pointing down to the three piles labelling them as 'Regular', 'Hard', and 'Hardest'. It can very educational for the teacher to see which students pick which one. 

The sheets roughly correspond to the same pattern of learning broken into 4-5 sections.

• Prediction: After students have been taken through the pre-reading PPT, ask them to think about what a short story called Galway Man might be about. Students then compare their prediction to how the story turned out.
• Adjectives: Monitor the text to locate and isolate adjectives/adjectival groups.
• Character or Flashback: Students actively consider the process of characterisation. This looks different on each sheet - ranging from a visualisation activity to an opportunity for students to draw explicit connections between a character and his purpose in the text. Some sheets may add or replace this with an examination of the story's use of a flashback as a structural narrative device.
• Genre: Students identify the ways in which the story fits into a specific genre, developing increased awareness of the significance of code and convention.

Resource: Adjusted Activity sheet
Resource: Core Activity sheet
Resource: Extension Activity sheet

Romeo and Juliet: A New Translation

 

About a year ago I put up a new 'translation' of Shakespeare's Macbeth that could be used in a mixed ability Stage 5 classroom. The provision of this as a single PDF allowed for the printing of booklets that could be read by the students without scanning back and forth to compare the modern English with Shakespeare's English (as is the case with the No Fear Shakespeare editions). Below you will find a similarly translated version of Romeo & Juliet that can also be used in a mixed ability Stage 5 classroom.

My reasons for doing this are as follows:

• I've gotten a lot of use out of the No Fear editions over the years but I wanted something that Western Sydney kids could engage in an easier way. Some of the language in the No Fear editions can feel 'clunky', or overly slavish to the original text - sometimes to the point of losing the essence of what Shakespeare was actually trying to say. For example, references to ancient Greek or Roman deities just don't make the same impact on teenagers these days. Why not replace such a reference with something else that gets the same point across?
• I've found that junior students can sometimes get confused by the reading pathway of the No Fear editions as they present the two versions of the text side-by-side. This is great for examining specific extracts but I think it can slow down the process of just enjoying Shakespeare's characters and plotting, especially if these are students who are already resistant to reading a 400 year old play.
• By working through the text and translating it myself I found I got a much clearer idea of what was happening in the play. This kind of close reading was incredibly valuable to me as a teacher. 

Undertaking this process also helped me form new opinions on things I hadn't really considered. I mean, it probably doesn't help that I'd never read the entire play from start to finish as an adult, but anyway... here are some of my favourite realisations!

• Romeo isn't in love. He just wants to have sex. By modern standards, the relationship he has with Juliet is actually kind of toxic. It's hard to read it so closely and not get the impression that Shakespeare is knowingly exloring the emotional detriment of a codependent relationship.
• Nurse is an incredibly irritating and self-contradicting character, and possibly one of my favourite Shakespearean comedy creations.
• It's actually a really rude text - plenty of people have written about this, but I never quite realised how rude it was until I got to the bit about medlar fruits and open arses.
• I take back what I said about Nurse, I think Peter might be my favourite comedic character in this play. The bit where he tries to talk to the musicians who have arrived for Juliet's wedding is still funny after all these centuries.
• Friar Lawrence is the most important character in the whole text. He encapsulates the play's theme of duality and reflects the Elizabethan concept of the Great Chain of Being through his discussion of the spectrum that exists between sin and virtue.
• The random introduction of the character 'Petruchio' into the Tybalt-Mercutio-Romeo fight scene led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about ghost characters. These are essentially characters that writers put in early drafts of texts and then later, while removing said character, accidentally remain in one or two references. Another ghost character, Valentine, is also mentioned earlier in the play - intended as Mercutio's brother but mostly removed when Shakespeare wrote later drafts.

Anyway, enough waffle, here is the play:

• Romeo & Juliet translated

(Disclaimer: apologies for any typos in the PDF above - I didn't get a chance to do a second draft as I was keen to give the text a try with my Year 9 students this upcoming term) 

Film Studies: Making a Zoetrope

Okay. A little context before I start: I'm currently about a quarter of the way through teaching a two-year Film Studies course. This is a board-endorsed course that I'm currently running at my school as a Stage 5 English elective, and this term the class is looking at Special Effects. More specifically, students look at how key innovations have enabled new representations and shifts in meaning within the context of film narratives. 

The activity below could quite easily be adapted as a fun, practical exploration of film for any junior English class.

The Zoetrope

The zoetrope is an early innovation in film technology that helped to establish the fundamental premise for turning photography into a moving image. Variations of this invention had been around for quite some time by the 19th century and were used to show simple looped animations. It wasn't until 1878, however, that the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented a way to take a rapid sequence of photographs to depict a horse running. He combined this system (which utilised 24 separate cameras and a series of tripwires) with the existing technologies of the zoetrope and the praxinoscope (which was like a zoetrope with mirrors) to create what is arguably the first film, The Horse in Motion. I've recreated this above in the zoetrope example.

Muybridge suffered a irreparable brain injury in a horse-carriage crash, which led to erratic and eccentric behaviour, and it was after this point that he came up with his impressive innovations in photography. It's believed that his accident damaged his orbitofrontal cortex, leading to an erasure of social inhibitions that allowed for increased creativity in his mind.

Some students will be interested in hearing this stuff, but all of my class were able to remember the content much more comprehensively after they themselves have had a go at making their own zoetropes.

My first prototype was more complicated then it needed to be - there are a couple of things in the picture above that I ended up not needing.

Preparation

There are lots of instructions online that give an idea of how the zoetrope and similar devices can be made in the classroom but I wanted to ensure that I was able to create one myself before I put it into the hands of the kids. This was invaluable because I quickly learned that some aspects of the process could be streamlined or were best avoided altogether. Click here for teacher creation-instructions, which were written after I'd fine-tuned the process.

Initially I set out to use a wire and wire cutters to set up a frame from which the device could spin but my wife Nicole pointed out that it was much easier to simply hold the string by hand and spin it that way. 

 

Additionally, the cutting of the cardboard strip also requires a fine blade and the idea of handing Stanley knives out to my Year 9 class made me break out into a cold sweat. So I pre-prepared the cardboard strips they would use in order to take this element out.

Here's what you'll need before handing over to the students:

• Black cardboard (enough for the whole class)
• Paper (to measure the cardboard strips)
• A scalpel or Stanley knife 
• A cutting board
• Plastic picnic plates (make sure they have a raised rim - this will allow for the cardboard strip to be held in place)
• A single-hole punch
• String, or thick thread
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Sticky tape

Use the paper to create a 'master' strip - this is what you'll use to measure and cut each of the black cardboard strips you'll be giving your students. The best measurements (that work with a standard-sized plastic plate) are as follow:

• 10 frames in length - 60mm per frame.
• Entire strip to be 100mm in height.
• The frames will sit in the bottom 40mm.
• Above the frames are 10 slits approx. 2mm wide and 40mm long. These sit above and between each frame. 

As you can imagine, 2mm is quite finnicky so you'll need that fine blade. Measure it all out on white paper and overlay the paper on the black cardboard to cut the black strips out. Use sticky tape to place the white paper in place and do it all on top of a cutting board. I made about 14 black strips and got my students to work in pairs (that way I had some spares in case the kids accidentally wrecked them on their first go).

In Class

I'd already covered the concept of the zoetrope in class a few times before so the students had a rough idea of what they were making. I also brought in my one to show them what a finished product should look like. This helped to really motivate the students because they could see what they were working towards. 

I gave students a series of different animations to pick from (this gives them some ownership over the final product) or the option to create their own animation (this is more time-consuming but there are a few students who appreciate getting to exercise their creativity in this way). 

Students (or student groups) are then provided with:

• 1 pre-made black cardboard strips.
• 1 plastic plate.
• A ruler to measure their own animations and to space the string-holes evenly on the plate. 
• Access to a single-hole punch to create the string-holes.
• String to cut (I let them measure and cut this themselves).
• Choice of animation or option to create their own animation.
• Access to sticky tape to fix their animation into the black cardboard barrel. 
• Instructions on how to make it. 

Some of the student zoetropes - great job guys!

The most time-consuming part of the whole process is creating the black cardboard strip but, as I'd already done this for the students ahead of time, this meant it only took approximately 1 hour for students to put the whole thing together. The instructions above are a simplified version of the teacher instructions and are easily followed by Year 9 students.