Books and films, yr 6 English.

For content and thinking aims, see Books and films, English, lesson 1.  For overall aims see Books and Films, Matilda and Holes.

Homework had been a Books and films, sorting task.  A group of words had already been sorted into two groups and discussed and now the pupils had to make a third group from these two groups and to answer a Films and books, questionnaire.

STEP 2: This was the start of making an ENV model, but before the challenge. The sorting task seemed to be quite difficult, but about half the class got the idea that the third group could be words about films and books. We then began to write up the different features of films and books on the board.

They then related this to their own experience, explain which books they had read and seen film versions of and which they preferred and why. One pupil made notes on the blackboard when it seemed a point had been made about the differences between films and books in general.

We then read a page in English from ‘Holes’ by Louis Sacher. They had just watched the film in their Finnish class and so were keen to say which were the main differences between the film and the book and which they had preferred and why. We related these to the differences we had on the board.

This was all we did in this lesson and at the end we had a list of differences between films and books. but they were not sorted or in a managable form. This was done in the following Finnish classes Books and films, Finnish, lesson 3 and Books and films, Finnish, lessons 4 - 6.

My reflections on these two lessons:  I don’t think these lessons had clear enough aims. The content aims were achieved as they learned many new words which they were using by our discussions at the end. They also enjoyed reading the Dahl poem in English (we read it aloud a few times, with feeling, and they enjoyed that!), and they were pleased at how much they understood of the excerpt from Holes. However, there wasn’t yet a challenge they were working towards, so although I knew I was working up to this, they didn’t. Probably they should have known, and then doing the tasks would have made much more sense. I liked using the poem with them, but I think, especially as we were short of time, I should have left it out in favour of having them do more thinking in groups about books and films. I think the lack of clarity was partly due to the fact that the Finnish teacher and I were working together and I knew what she wanted to do next, so I tried not to do the same. We’d like to try more together, but we would plan it in a different way another time. The next four lessons which continued on from this were Finnish lessons, carried out in the mother tongue.