Lesson video

Welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Mrs. Crompton.

Our focus today is developing a personal response and producing a piece of evaluative writing.

You will need a pen and paper.

Take a moment to make sure you have cleared any distractions away and have everything you need to hand.

Let's have a look at this question together.

The Time Traveller is a reckless character.

He is so obsessed with his machine that he does not notice the dangers or think about the consequences of time travel.

To what extent do you agree? The first thing I would like you to do, is to take that question down on your piece of paper so that you have it to refer back to.

Just pause the video momentarily and resume as soon as you're ready.

Next, let's have a look at the following screen.

A little bit unusual.

The rectangle that you can see is a representation of the outside edges of your piece of paper.

What I'd like you to do now is to take, it'll be need to be a fresh piece of paper, fresh piece of paper and turn it to a landscape orientation.

And then in the middle, I would like you to draw two ovals, making sure that you have got space in each section so that we can do some writing.

And what we're going to do is just to use this as a slightly different way of planning our response to the question.

Again, pause the video.

As soon as you're happy with the shape of your ovals, then resume again.

And this is what we're going to do with this.

What you can see on the screen right now, is that we have got the outside edge of your page now blocked out in the pink, and this is the space that we're going to write in.

And as we are writing, we're going to record our initial responses to the question.

At this point.

I'm not giving you a copy of the text to look over again.

We're going to do it based on what we have learned over the series of lessons.

And I also just want to record your gut reactions.

Those responses that you've got deep inside, your personal response is absolutely crucial within this question.

However, there are a few things we need to consider.

We've got our Time Traveller and he's created his machine.

And off he goes into the future.

Now we know a little bit more about the future that he lands up in.

It's a world where we have got the Eloi's living above ground.

They are very looked after, they live a very luxurious lifestyle and they have the Morlocks providing for them.

Who in turn look more savage in comparison, maybe more wild.

And what we find out is that even though it appears to be a divide between the luxury of the rich, the Elois and the poor living conditions of the Morlocks who are underground, it's actually the Morlocks that are in control because they are fattening up the Eloi and then eating them.

There's a really dark twist in the story.

Is that reckless? Is it reckless of a man to just fire off headlong and not really know the world that he's going into? What we've got initially is a statement, the Time Traveller is a reckless character forms a statement sentence.

And what I would like you to do, is to respond to that initially, and maybe taking the left hand side of your piece of paper and just writing in the margins.

Do you think he is reckless? Give me your answer and tell me why.

Next step, you'll have time to do this in a moment.

Don't worry if you haven't got everything down, I'll just go through the instructions.

The next step, is an evaluative part to the question.

He is so obsessed with his machine, that he does not notice the dangers or think about the consequences of time travel.

Is he obsessed? Is the obsession with creating the machine, the overriding factor which then means that he doesn't think about the dangers and the consequences.

At this point, you now need to think about the evidence that you can gather from the text and also the evidence you can gather from your own reading as to whether you think that that is a valid evaluation of what is actually going on.

We've got the statements, "the Time Traveller is a reckless character" and then we've got a second part to the question that is evaluative in nature.

We need to weigh up the evidence in order to come to our conclusion.

I'm going to ask you to pause at this point, and to fill in around those pink edges of your sheet.

All of your initial reactions to the question.

Please don't worry about the evidence part.

I know I said, we need to weigh that up, we're going to do that, but I want those gut reactions.

Pause, taking the question, jot down your ideas does not have to be in full sentences.

This is planning and then we will move on.

Over to you.

The next part, I'm going to explain these next two sections and how they work and then I'm going to give you the text because going any further is going to be impossible without evidence.

What examples will you give to support your ideas? And notice that I'm using this word "support" very specifically.

These quotations that we select can be either rich quotations where the language helps you develop the interpretation, or they can be statement-type quotations.

Supporting quotations that back up the point you wish to make.

What I need you to do, in the middle ring, this pink one that's now denoted to you on the screen.

That's where you're going to put your quotations.

What you might want to do, is to divide that in half and at the top, you're going to find me three quotations to help you answer the statement part, "the Time Traveller is reckless", and then in the bottom half, find two or three quotations that are going to help you address this idea that he's obsessed.

He's not taking dangers into consideration.

He's not thinking about consequences.

That's what will go in this next part of the grid.

Let's just look at the final part.

In this final part of the grid, this is when you've done all of your thinking, and here, I want you to write down your refined ideas.

This is where you are going to give me your final conclusion.

He may be reckless, but he's not actually obsessed.

He's really X, et cetera.

Refined sentences are going to sum up all your ideas and you going to get your wording just right.

You're going to be thinking about your precision with your vocabulary choices.

It's also a place where we will then take ideas from this middle section to form either introduction or conclusion.

It's also a place where we can think about big picture ideas and a reminder, big picture ideas are those ideas whereby we are learning something about human nature, about mankind, about society.

We're dealing with those universal themes.

In terms of how it's going to look, the next step is first ring quotations for both parts.

There will be six quotations in total.

Then final thinking, trying to get a perfected sentence down into the section, right at the centre that gives us the overview and your big picture ideas.

You will now have opportunity to work through looking at the extract again and gathering that information.

The extract is now ready for you.

You can see it coming up.

I'll just go right back and leave you completely in control of the video from this point, so that you can decide where you need to pause.

When you have gathered all of your information together and your grid is completely filled, then I'll be waiting for you to go through to the next steps.

And welcome back.

You'll have your piece of paper, lots of ideas now.

What we need to do is sequence this information.

Our next step is to think about the ordering and the linking of our points.

And on the screen now you can see that I've separated out our question into two areas.

Again, we've got the statement, "the Time Traveller is a reckless character", and then I've got quotation one, quotation two, quotation three.

You might have picked more, now is the time where you have to refine those choices.

And the main thing you need to do, is to think about how one quotation is going to lead into the next ones.

And we need to have the thread that ties them through.

Just as we did with our cloud analysis, we need to think about, what's going to anchor our idea and how we are then going to talk about reinforcing evidence, contrasting evidence, et cetera.

This is now a time when you need to work out the sequence in which you're going to make your points.

We then work through the next row, and that row deals with the evaluative part of the statement.

"He is so obsessed with his machine that he does not notice the dangers or think about the consequences".

And again, quotation one, quotation two, quotation three.

We are ordering the sequence of our quotations, so that we can link and build our line of argument.

Over to you.

Pause the video.

Try and get those quotations into the correct sequence so that you can link your ideas.

Where are we up to? We've got all the evidence together.

We have reviewed it and got it into a sequence.

The next thing we're going to do, is to just make sure that we have got a combination of supporting, there's those ones that back up the points supporting quotations and rich quotations, because we need to make sure we're still commenting on the writer's language.

At least one of them needs to be rich in nature.

We need to make sure that we sequence the points, you should have just done that.

And now we're going to make sure that we can use the rest of our planning grid with the ovals to make sure that our evaluative judgments are clear.

We've got the conclusion in the right place.

And we have got a clear, big picture statement.

All of that is now hopefully in place.

The green, the evaluative judgments and conclusions will come from that sequencing process.

Because of this, I know this.

And you're weighing up the evidence.

And your big picture statement comes from the central part of your original planning grid.

What did you think the overall point was within the extract? How did you feel about the character of the Time Traveller? What ideas is H G Wells trying to get us to think about in terms of the way human beings behave.

And now, that means we're ready to write up our answer.

What we're going to do, is to work through this together.

The first thing you're going to do, is using the pink section of your planning sheet, give an overview statement.

The Time Traveller is not reckless, he is actually X.

You're giving the overview statement, your refined response.

And then, you're going to work through the first row of evidence that responds to that statement.

Within that, we have the reminder to remember to comment on the writer's methods when you are analysing your evidence.

It's over to you.

Overview statement to start with.

I agree with this statement, I disagree with this statement.

The Time Traveller is, or is not reckless because.

Can you give me that overview and then work through your evidence.

Pause the video and work your way through that.

Resume when you are ready.

We're going to work on the next row of evidence.

We're dealing with the part where we are looking at whether or not, he didn't take into consideration the dangers and the consequences, and that he is just obsessed with the process of building this time machine.

You are now systematically working through your next row of evidence.

Once you have done that, you then add on your final conclusion, remembering those big picture ideas, making sure that your phrasing is absolutely precise.

A sentence along the lines of ultimately the extract shows us is often helpful, but have a little look now, pausing the screen again to work through your second row of evidence and then adding on your final conclusion.

And well done.

Thank you for your focus today.

We've managed to produce an evaluative response to the Time Traveler's recklessness or not.

As you see it during the course of H G Wells' "The time Machine".

All that remains for me to say is, thank you for your focus again.

Enjoy the rest of your learning today.

Before you leave the lesson, do not forget to do that exit quiz.

Let's just make sure that we've consolidated all of our learning from the lessons this week.