Primary Literacy - The Cultural Olympiad

You’d be right in thinking that the Cultural Olympiad would include many works by Britain’s most famous poets, writers and playwrights. Performances of plays, readings of extracts of famous books and recital of great poetry have all marked the Olympiad. In this series of activities you will introduce the children to some of Britain’s best loved poetry, the world’s most enjoyed stories and help them to use recognised plots in creating great stories of their own.

Activity One – Poetry Recital

LO: Be able to confidently recite a piece of poetry to an audience using expression, pace and dynamics
       Be able to learn a piece of poetry or prose off by heart

Reciting poetry develops speaking and listening skills, confidence and an understanding of poetry and prose. Children get too few chances to express themselves through performance these days with the crush of the curriculum but spending some time working on poetry recital is very worthwhile across the curriculum as it gives children the confidence to speak out and offer opinions.

Children are mainly exposed to modern and often humorous poetry but have little experience of more serious or classic poetry until they reach KS3. Begin by reading a poem to the children that is in a style and on a subject that may be unfamiliar to them. Suggestions include Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ or for something a little different, Benjamin Zephaniah’s ‘Talking Turkeys. You could also choose pieces from the LAMDA syllabus
http://www.lamda.org.uk/exams/candidates/subjects/documents/GradedExaminationsinCommunicationwebversion.pdf

You can of course choose your own poems but try to aim for ones that express ideas from other cultures or countries.

Begin by reading it in a normal voice avoiding emphasis and dynamics. Ask the children what they thought of the poem. Now read it with feelings, expression and dynamics and ask the children what they think now.
Write a simple phrase or sentence on the board, for example ‘No, I won’t go’

Talking Point: Discuss the different ways the sentence or phrase could be said.
Under what circumstances might we say the words in each of those styles?
Now choose one of the ways the children have suggested the words could be said, for example, in a whisper. Suggest to them that if this was a line in a poem, what lines might come before it and after it. You should find that they’ll suggest lines that indicate a secret or a desire not to be heard, for example…

Will you go with me?
‘No I won’t go’
I’m too scared

Ask the children to use the way they suggested ‘No I won’t go.’ might be said and to write the line before and the line after.

Talking Point: Ask the children to read out their work using the style they suggested. Ask the rest of the class if they think it worked with the additional lines.

The next step is to get children to practise a piece of poetry or prose for recital. You can do it formally by entering the children into the London Academy for Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) Speaking and Listening Exams or more informally, choose poems or prose from their syllabus and do it yourself in school. The document also gives guidance as to what the performer needs to do to recite it perfectly.

It’s good to give the children an audience so try to arrange an assembly when they can perform their pieces to the whole school.

At Home: It’s important for the children to practise their pieces and setting practice for homework means they get to perform it to family where they are likely to be more confident.

Activity Two – Using Plots in Different Settings

LO: Be able to identify the plot within a story
Use a recognised plot as a scaffold for rewriting the story in a different setting

Many of us will have been to performances of plays or operas, or seen them on TV where the original setting has been changed giving a freshness to the play or opera. One of the favourites of Hollywood is to use the plots from Shakespeare and place them in a modern setting.

For this activity, unless you’ve been studying a Shakespeare play in detail, you’ll need to start simply. Choose a play from the BBC Animated Shakespeare series and watch it with the children.

Talking Point: Ask the children to tell you what the plot of the story was. You may have to explain the word plot to younger or less able pupils.

Map out the plot on the board avoiding using specifics that tie it to the original setting and ask the children to think about how that plot could be transposed into say, the school playground, or a soap opera.

Write the story as a class on the board as a precursor to the children writing their own. Read out the class story and check with the children that they think the plot is the same.

Now choose a different play from the animated series and after identifying the plot, ask the children to write their own story using the plot.

At Home: Shakespeare’s plays had characters of different shades. Give the children a list of the ‘dramatis personae’ from the plays they’ve watched and ask them to sort them into good or bad characters. Many of his characters were influencers or influenced by others. Ask the more able children to decide which of these labels they would place the characters under.

Activity Three – Shakespeare’s Sonnets

LO: Identify and translate unfamiliar language in classic poetry using contextual clues
      Be able to identify the metre of sonnets and use it to maintain the style in work of their own

Shakespeare’s sonnets are some of the earliest forms of poetry that children will come across in school. They are quite hard to access but they provide a useful tool for decoding language and understanding the meaning of words and phrases.

Choose one of the better known sonnets such as…

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d
And every fair from fair sometimes declines
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Or lose possession of that fair thou ownest
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
So long lives this and this gives life to thee

Read the sonnet to the children and ask them who they think it’s from and to.

Go through the poem and explain the meaning of thou, thy and thee.

Now ask the children for their ideas on the meanings of some of the more difficult words which are underlined. Encourage them to use contextual clues to help their suggestions.

Can they spot the use of metaphors in the sonnet?

Finally, give them a copy of the sonnet, double spaced, so they can try to turn it into modern language. Some of the less able may need help and it can be useful here to use learning partners.

At Home:  You’ll find that the translation will make the sonnet a little clumsy. As an extension activity or for homework, ask the children to rewrite their translation to make it flow better.

Secondary English - Any Questions?

I sometimes wonder what my students really think about my lessons. No, let me correct that. I sometimes wonder what my students really understand in my lessons. Unfortunately I think that too often there is a gap between my assumptions of what they ‘get’ and what they don’t. So, last week I, rather bravely, decided to get inside my Year 11 students’ heads.

It was a simple exercise. At the beginning of our lesson, on ‘Romeo and Juliet’, I asked them to write down three sentences on a piece of paper. These could be: an observation about the scene we were studying; a question to test another student’s understanding; a question that they would like to ask me. During the lesson, every student had to contribute one point from their sheet and when any observations were made or questions answered satisfactorily they crossed them off. At the end of the lesson, the students handed in their sheets so that I could look at any questions left unanswered. In the following lesson, I was then able to address these questions and go through any points of confusion in the scene.

This was a fascinating activity.  There were an overwhelming number of questions that focussed on ‘What does X word mean?’ that seemed to trouble even the most able students. As much as I think that I have explained the important words or bleat on about getting the ‘gist’ of certain passages, I found that my students wanted to understand it all- they wanted to join the missing links so they could solve the puzzle of Shakespeare’s language. I had not always predicted which words would tie up which students in knots and until we completed this exercise, many of them seemed to view the text as incomprehensible, even if it turned out there were only two words out of twenty that they did not really understand. I found that by unravelling these knots, it enabled many students to then start to unpack the layers of meaning in the language choices in a more meaningful way than before.

This exercise has real possibilities and I am excited about trying it out in other areas. We will be preparing for their Mocks next and I think it could be illuminating to find out what my students really understand about the non-fiction exam. Who knows, now that I have found out that what is inside my students’ heads is not so frightening, I might even dare to ask what they actually think about my lessons!

Naomi Hursthouse
Advance Skills Teacher 
Steyning Grammar School

Secondary English - Shakespeare in their language!

Making Shakespeare exciting and relevant to today’s teenagers

Another academic year underway, a new timetable to be cautiously navigated… and the same old intractable dilemma  – how to make the words of Shakespeare speak to teenagers born into a world so brave that not even the great man himself could have envisaged it.

‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...’

Well, it can certainly seem that way when you’re caught between the rock of thirty disaffected teenagers and the hard place of the GCSE English curriculum. And yet the plays themselves are full of the kind of stuff that the modern teen thrives upon. Take ‘Macbeth’, for example: intrigue, betrayal, murder, revenge, insanity, all served up with a liberal helping of gore. And, just for good measure, a hefty dose of the supernatural thrown in from the outset!

So what’s the problem? Well, ‘duh!’ it’s the language ‘in it’? No brainer, really. And the average scene length doesn’t help either, especially when our teens have been reared on a quick-fix cinematic culture which frequently puts action before dialogue and changes scenes at a rate that would have made the bard feel dizzy.

One possible solution to the problem is the Teen-Shakespeare approach.

The Teen-Shakespeare project is being developed in order to provide teenagers with a gateway into the most popular of Shakespeare's plays. Comprising a full term’s scheme of work, each Teen-Shakespeare text will incorporate analytical and creative tasks as well as speaking and listening and reading and writing activities.

The Teen-Shakespeare Macbeth is the first in the series and, although suitable for use at any point in the academic year, is especially ideal for that tricky last term in Year 9 when you want to help your students make the transition from KS3 to GCSE… whilst simultaneously keeping them engaged on those sun-drenched afternoons when it can get extremely hot behind the paint-stuck windowsand adolescent thoughts very quickly turn to the long summer break.

Updated to the setting of an exclusive and fiercely competitive Scottish boarding school, and with three menacing rap sisters lurking in the background, the Teen-Shakespeare Macbeth has been designed as a gateway into the original classic. By reincarnating the tragedy of this major Shakespearean character in a realistic contemporary teenage context, and by using language that teenagers can readily understand, this exciting new drama aims to help them better understand Shakespeare, themselves and each other.

Of course, English teachers are notoriously creative – it goes with the territory – and this is an approach that you might wish to develop in your own classroom in entirely your own way. There’s no reason why you and your students couldn’t write your own adaptation of all, or part, of a Shakespearean classic. It might prove to be a fun way of meeting many of those lofty syllabus objectives… whilst simultaneously making Shakespeare exciting and relevant to the modern teen.

If you would like to sample the Teen-Shakespeare project, then you might care to take advantage of the following free downloads:
1) Teen-Shakespeare Macbeth, Act 1
2) Associated teaching and learning activities
3) Exemplar answers to the above

For further information on the Teen-Shakespeare project, please visit:
www.teen-shakespeare.com

Peter Morrisson
English Teacher, author and creator of the Teen-Shakespeare project