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Bright Sparks – Why The Fun And Creativity Shouldn’t Stop At KS4

The importance of fun shouldn't be overlooked at KS4 English, argues Louise Brown – it could unlock the depth of learning your students are going to need…

Louise Brown
by Louise Brown
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Fun isn’t just for KS3. The accountability attached to teaching KS4, particularly Year 11, shouldn’t scare us into withholding our creative energies from our KS4 lesson planning.

If anything, KS4 should be no less fun or creative than KS3, as students are surely more likely to engage in their learning for greater length and depth when they are enjoying it.

There is a wealth of free multimedia materials floating around in the ether, and they are ours for the taking. With a pinch of our creative magic, we can easily transform these materials into fantastic stimuli through which our students can practise and perfect their close analysis skills. Pair these whizzy stimulus materials with collaborative and competitive activities and hey, presto! – the class is buzzing!

Starter activity

Get those lights turned off and the big screen fired up. To hook students, show a current clip or trailer – I have had success with clips from Bear Grylls, Karl Pilkington and many trailers of movies adapted from novels in recent years, such as The Woman in Black, I Am Number Four and The Great Gatsby.

As students watch, you could get them to respond to a series of short comprehension questions, identify the overall ‘tone’ of the clip or consider how it is engaging.

Main activities

1. Reading Images Students could label literal and implied meanings in still images from or related to the aforementioned clips. This can be modelled beforehand, if this approach to analysis is new to them. Prompts could be provided to scaffold responses.

Alternatively, to stretch, a list of challenging vocabulary could be provided and students instructed to include it in their labelling. Students could join with a partner to share/discuss/refine their annotations.

2. Collective memory Before presenting a written text, you could recap key terminology. One way to do this is by pairing students up and getting them to look (no writing at this point – ‘pens down, jazz hands!’) at definitions, examples and associated images for one minute. Remove the stimulus, and then allow a further two minutes for them to copy down in pairs what they can recall from memory.

Repeat the above two steps until one of the pairs has all the information down correctly.

3. Get textual Introduce a written text, preferably linked to the clips/images, with key vocabulary and/or devices removed. This could be a transcript from the clip or trailer, a novel extract, a piece of travel writing, a poem, a ‘blurb’ or a song. The students decide on suitable vocabulary and/or literary devices to fill in the gaps, focusing on the specific effects they want to create.

You could add a competitive element by dividing the class into teams (which the pupils get to name, of course). Attach a time limit and award points – for example, 1 point for an interesting verb, 2 points for an effective simile. Students could then act as ‘envoys’, justifying their vocabulary choices to the other teams and taking feedback on its effectiveness.

You could follow this by sharing the original text, giving students the opportunity to compare their language choices and their respective effects.

4. Expert groups Alternatively, divide the text into smaller extracts and allocate an extract to each group. Each group member can be assigned a role – ‘scribe’, ‘mediator’, ‘highlighter’ and ‘expert’, for example – but make clear that it’s everyone’s role to think. Groups then annotate the given extract, using prompts provided by the ‘expert’ (pre-prepared by the teacher). The role of the expert is to coach the group, not simply give answers.

After a given time, a new ‘expert’ is selected within each group. The groups rotate, but the new ‘expert’ remains and coaches the new group. This can be repeated until all groups have rotated around all extracts. A peer assessment activity could be attached to this, where the ‘expert’ rates each group against a set of success criteria.

Summary and home learning

There are opportunities for checking progress throughout all of the activities. Questioning can be used at any point to check understanding, elicit responses and encourage development. Listening to conversations as you circulate during the group activities should provide a good indication of levels of analysis. The students’ annotations can be collected in and used to inform next steps, as can the peer-assessment sheets.

Why not invite students to select a trailer, image, song or other medium to apply their analysis skills to? They could practise their spoken language skills by presenting their analysis to the class.

Louise Brown is assistant principal, leading on learning and teaching at Ormiston Venture Academy in Norfolk, and delivers CPD through the Ignite Teaching School Alliance; for more information, follow @OrmistonVenture

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