Hello, my name is Ms. Grant.

I'm so glad you've decided to learn with me today.

We're in our World at war: short stories unit, and today we're going to be looking at a letter, a letter written by a soldier called Wilfred Owen.

Some of you might know this soldier.

He's best known for his poems about World War I.

Well, today we're going to look at a letter that he wrote in 1917 to his mother.

Like his poems, his letter is quite harrowing to read and it's a very truthful account of the horrors of trench warfare.

I'm glad to look at this letter to celebrate it, to remember Wilfred Owen in the way that he deserves.

But I'm also really interested today into looking at the idea of reading.

What does it mean to read a text? How do you approach a text that might at first seem quite difficult? I'm gonna be your support and guide as we work through today's lesson together.

I can't wait to hear all of your fantastic ideas.

Let's get started.

So by the end of today's lesson, you're going to be able to show a thorough understanding of a letter that Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother.

So Wilfred Owen, a soldier in World War I, best known for his poetry about World War I, but he also wrote many, many letters to his mother he was very close to about his experiences in the trenches.

Now I just want to interrogate this phrase a bit, thorough understanding of a letter.

This is going to involve two different types of reading today, skim reading, and then close reading.

And we're gonna have a look at those key terms in our key word section.

But I really just want to examine the idea that when you are reading a text that might be quite difficult, the idea that you would get it 100% the first time, you don't need to worry that that is what you need to do when you are reading.

It's good to develop an understanding of a text over time through reading and then rereading, just like you would with a fictional text.

If you are reading a complicated play or a complicated novel, you might not just read it once.

You might return to it or return to sections of it.

And we're gonna do the same thing today with Wilfred Owen's letter to his mother.

So our key words for today that are gonna help us achieve our objective, the first is nonfiction.

Then we've got this phrase skimming and scanning.

We've got close reading, gist and tone.

Let's go through their definitions.

So nonfiction is writing that is factual rather than made up.

It is the opposite of fiction.

So an example of fiction would be something like Shakespeare's "The Tempest".

Today we're going to look at an example of nonfiction.

So Wilfred Owen was a real person, or real soldier in World War I, and we're gonna look at a letter that he actually wrote to his mother.

Skimming and scanning, now this is the act of quickly reading over a text, gathering its keywords, tone, and main ideas.

And that's the first way we're gonna read Wilfred Owen's letter to his mother.

We're just gonna skim and scan it.

Close reading, this is when you carefully, thoughtfully and slowly examine a text, considering the choices the writer made.

And that's gonna be our second act of reading today in our lesson.

We're gonna do some close reading after we've got the general ideas, the general tone, the main ideas from our skimming and scanning.

Gist, this is the main idea or essence of something, often brief and in a simplified form.

So if we want the gist of something, we just want its main ideas.

And tone, a writer's attitude or emotional stance, and it encompasses the mood, feeling and overall atmosphere.

So these are our keywords or phrases for today's lesson, and they're gonna help us achieve our objectives that are gonna be referenced throughout.

Our lesson outline for today, in our first learning cycle, we are going to practise skimming and scanning.

And in our second learning cycle, we are going to practise the act of close reading.

So let's start off with skimming and scanning.

Now I'd like you to discuss before we begin, what do you already know about Wilfred Owen? So he's quite famous.

Don't worry if you haven't heard of him.

We're going to examine who he is in today's lesson.

But if you have, what do you already know about Wilfred Owen? Pause the video and discuss the question now.

Some really nice discussions there showing your knowledge of Wilfred Owen, some of you as a poet, knowing him as a poet, some people saying I wasn't quite sure who he was.

That's absolutely fine.

We're gonna look at some responses some other pupils had and we're gonna develop our ideas.

So here are three ideas that other pupils had.

We've got, "Owen was a soldier in World War I," "Wilfred Owen wrote a poem called 'Exposure', and then finally "I've read a book about World War I called 'Regeneration.

' It focuses on soldiers with shell shock, which some men experienced during the war.

Owen was one of them." So I'd like you to discuss now, can you add or develop these ideas? You've already had initial discussion about Wilfred Owen.

You might have known something about him.

You might not have.

But now seeing these three ideas from these pupils, can you add to or develop these ideas? Pause the video and discuss the question now.

Welcome back after a really lovely discussion developing some of these ideas that students had.

So that first one "Owen was a soldier in World War I," lots of people saying, well, I know World War I started in 1914 and it ended in 1918.

So this must have been roughly when Wilfred Owen was writing his poems, and indeed this letter to his mother.

And the letter to his mother is in fact dated 1917.

"Wilfred Owen wrote a poem called 'Exposure'." Some people saying, well, I don't know that poem, but I do know his poem, "Dulce et Decorum est", some people quoting from the beginning of that very powerful poem, that depiction of a gas attack in World War I.

And a few people had read "Exposure" and said, well, I think that really explores the weather in World War I.

It was often really treacherous in the trenches.

So soldiers weren't just fighting against the enemy, the idea that the enemy might kill them, but actually the weather, being exposed to the weather might kill them as well.

And then this finally, this final idea about reading a book called "Regeneration".

Now, lots of you might have read some war literature over your time, and this student here has read "Regeneration", which I have also read.

It's a fantastic trilogy by a writer called Pat Barker.

So there are three books in this trilogy, and just `as he says, absolutely it deals with soldiers who've experienced shell shock.

And it's a really close examination of what that psychological condition looks like.

And Owen, Wilfred Owen, he indeed suffered from shell shock.

And he appears in this book.

So even this book is fictional, he appears in the book as a character.

So some ideas about Wilfred Owen, the most important being that he was a soldier in World War I.

That context is really gonna help us today.

Now, Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 and he died in 1918.

So some people saying, well, perhaps he died in the war because that is the last year of the war.

And indeed you are correct.

He did die in the war, in World War I.

Now he's a British poet and soldier, and his poems about World War I stood the test of time.

So some of you said, I've read some of his poetry.

And that's because even though they were written over 100 years ago, they have stood the test of time.

They're powerful now as they were when they were first written.

Now here are some lines from three of his poems about World War I.

We've got "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge." "Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us." "Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles, carnage incomparable, and human squander," which means waste.

Now I'd like you to discuss what words or phrases stand out to you from these three poems. Why do they stand out to you? And what do you think Owen wants to convey about the war? So pause the video, look at these three incredibly powerful moments from three of Owen's poems, and discuss this question.

Pause the video now.

Welcome back after a really lovely discussion there about these three really powerful moments from three of Owen's perhaps most famous poems. And a few ideas that I'd just like to pick out on, I heard a few people saying, well, I could hear Ms. Grant actually struggling to say that second line, "Our brains ache in the merciless iced east winds that knive us." And again, I'm struggling to say it again, and it's the power of those words in that order.

The kind of S sound that seems to come through through merciless and iced and east and winds seems to maybe mimic the power of the wind.

So really careful language choice there with Owen trying to convey how powerful and how merciless the wind is.

And that verb there, knive us, aggressive verb, the idea that the wind is at battle with the soldiers as well as the enemy itself.

And then lots of people said, well, I can see what Owen is trying to convey about war in this last section because he uses this phrase human squander.

He's saying that it's a waste, carnage incomparable, there's nothing to compare this carnage to this warfare, and it's a waste, human squander, so a really powerful moment there where Owen seems to be explicitly saying that this is a waste of of humans, of people in this war.

So some really lovely discussions there, and we're already getting an idea of who Wilfred Owen is, what he thinks, and the type or the way in which he expresses his views.

Now Wilfred Owen is best known for his unflinching portrayal of trench warfare, and we just looked at three examples there.

And his poems explore its physical and emotional trauma.

Owen condemns war and its "human squander", a phrase that lots of you picked up on in our discussion.

Now, Owen died in 1918.

It was just one week before the end of the war, and his mother received news of his death the day World War I officially ended, on the 11th of November, 1918.

And we're gonna look today at a letter between Wilfred Owen and his mother, who as I said at the beginning, he was very, very close to.

A check for understanding before we move and look at this letter, just so we're secure in our understanding of who Wilfred Owen is and some of the ideas or thoughts that he had about World War I.

So true or false, Wilfred Owen's poems are patriotic.

Pause the video and select whether you think that's true or false.

Pause the video now.

Well done if you selected false.

Now I'd like you to justify your answer.

Is it a, Owen explores the idea of human squander of war, so whilst he's not patriotic, his poems do glorify war? Or Owen fought bravely for Britain during World War I and was awarded medals for his service, but his poems are about the futility of dying for your country, not its glory.

Pause the video and select your justification now.

Well done if you selected b, seeing that that phrase human squander, it means waste.

And therefore his poems are not about the glory of war, not patriotic, but instead saying we are wasting valuable lives in this trench warfare.

Now today we're going to read a letter that Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother in 1917.

This is a piece of nonfiction, and here is its title, "Letter written by Wilfred Owen to his mother, 16th of January, 1917".

Now I'd like you to discuss what are some of your predictions about what this letter may contain, and what are these predictions based on? Pause the video and discuss these two questions now.

Welcome back, a really lovely discussion there, and we talked quite a lot or at the beginning I talked quite a lot about what it meant to read a text and all the skills that it involves.

And one of these, the idea of prediction, is a really, really important one.

So just looking at the title and thinking before I even start reading the text, I can guess or I can make an educated guess about some of the things that I might find in there.

And that is going to be really, really helpful for me.

It's gonna help me understand the text.

So we know it's a letter.

We know it's from a soldier, Wilfred Owen to his mother.

And we do know a little bit about this soldier.

We know that he's known for his poems about World War I, which depict unflinching, graphic portrayals sometimes of trench warfare.

So maybe we're going to find something graphic, an unflinching look at the idea of trench warfare in this letter.

We know that the letter is to his mother, and we know he was very close to his mother.

So there might be also some establishing of relationship there, and the idea that he might miss her or he longs to see her.

And we can see that it's in 1917, so it is a year before he dies but it's quite near the end of the war.

So his anger at the war might be at its height here because he's been fighting for three years.

So you've made some really nice predictions.

And what were those predictions based on? Well, they were based on your contextual understanding of this period and of this man.

Sometimes being faced with a nonfiction text written over 100 years ago can feel overwhelming.

A good approach is to skim and scan it.

This is where you glance through a text and look for clues, for example, keywords to give you an understanding of what the text is about.

Skimming and scanning along with making predictions from the title enables you to get the gist of the text.

You can draw inferences about tone, subject and key images.

So skimming and scanning is something you just quickly do with your eyes over the text, and you look for the things that leap out at you.

So you've made some predictions from the title of the text you're about to read.

Then you can skim and scan.

And you're starting to build on your predictions, to build your understanding of a text.

So reading is not about 100% getting it right first time, but developing and understanding using lots of little strategies in order to help you.

One is looking at the title, making some predictions.

The next one is skimming and scanning.

So check for understanding before we move on to skimming and scanning text ourself.

What might skimming and scanning help you work out about a text? Is it a, specific choices the writer has made, b, its tone or c, a detailed gist? Pause the video and select the response you think is correct.

Pause the video now.

Well done if you selected b, its tone.

So it's not a, specific choices the writer has made.

That's what we do when we do close reading.

Skimming and scanning is just getting the main idea.

And well done to all of you who noticed that a detailed gist is a phrase that doesn't make any sense.

Gist is getting an overall idea.

Detailed is the opposite of that, is looking at specific choices that a writer has made.

So it is b, tone is what we can work out from skimming and scanning, or one of the things we can work out from skimming and scanning.

So here is the first section of Wilfred Owen's letter.

And the first thing you're going to do is you're just gonna skim and scan it.

And the second thing you're going to do is you're gonna discuss what words catch your eye, what can you infer about the general tone or mood, and how does context help support your ideas? Now this is designed to be a reasonably quick activity.

I'm not looking for any specific answers.

It's what leaps out to you.

So you're gonna pause the video and you're gonna quickly skim and scan this opening of this letter, and just have a discussion.

What words catch your eye? No right or wrong answers here.

What can you infer about the general tone or mood? And how does context help support your ideas? Pause the video and complete these two tasks now.

Welcome back after skimming and scanning that text nice and quickly, and then having a nice discussion about certain things that jump out to you just with this initial glance at the text.

Lots of you said, the word that really sticks out to me is this word I.

I can see it all over the place in these two paragraphs.

And that really caught my eye too and I thought, well, this is a letter, a very personal letter.

So it's about his experience in the war, in the trenches.

So perhaps that's why that word I comes up all the time.

So we are seeing something.

After all it is a letter, a letter that he intended for his mother.

He didn't know that we would be reading it all these 100 years later.

So he can feel free to really express things about himself in this letter.

Others said the phrase that really leaps out to me is bitterly disappointed, and this other phrase seventh hell.

So there's a definite unhappiness in this letter, disappointment about not getting a letter from his mother and not receiving it, and then this idea that he has been somewhere really, really catastrophic.

He says he's been in seventh hell.

So this idea that the trench, this experience that he's had in the trench has been absolutely awful.

So even just skimming and scanning, picking out a phrase here, even just that word I has actually helped us really, really understand this opening section of this letter from Wilfred Owen to his mother.

Now our third task, I'd like you to skim and scan the rest of Wilfred Owen's 1917 letter to his mother.

You can find this on the worksheet.

And as you read, I'd like you to select key words and phrases which stand out, noting what each suggests about the tone of the letter and its main ideas.

And I want you to be prepared to explain the gist of the letter, just the overall idea that you've seen in the letter.

Now again, remember that this is skimming and scanning, seeing things that leap out to you, words or phrases just like we did with that opening section with the word I, that phrase bitterly disappointed or that phrase seventh hell.

So we're not moving into the close reading yet.

Just skim and scan this letter.

And this is about noting initial ideas.

It's just our first stage of the reading.

We don't need to get absolutely everything from this letter the first time.

So pause the video, look at the letter, skim and scan it, and complete those two activities as you go through.

I will see you back here shortly, where we will have a look at some of the images that stood out to you and the gist of the letter.

Pause the video and complete the tasks now.

Welcome back, well done for doing that second skim and scan.

We looked at that first section together.

You now looked at the rest of that letter.

And it's just nice to see some of those worksheets with little notes on them.

So a little bit of highlight of keywords or images that stood out to you.

And I can see lots of people saying, yeah, I think I've got the overall gist of the letter.

I think I understand what Wilfred Owen is saying in this 1917 letter to his mother.

So some feedback, we're gonna consider one of Jacob's annotations.

So an image that really, really stuck out to Jacob was this phrase "an octopus of sucking clay." This is where Wilfred Owen is describing the mud of the trenches, and he saw that word octopus.

It seemed quite strange to him within this letter about the trenches, and so he just highlighted it.

And his note at the side is nice, short and sharp, key image portraying the mud, strange, powerful.

It doesn't need to be any deeper than that at this point.

So we've got that he selected a key image, and we've got this general exploration.

So it doesn't need to be detailed at this point.

This is a really, really nice example of skimming and scanning, selecting key images from Jacob.

Now I'd like you to discuss, what key images did you select and why? So pause the video.

You'll have some annotations just like Jacob.

Have a discussion now.

What did you select? What key images and why? Pause the video and complete the discussion task now.

Welcome back, some really, really nice discussions.

I've got a range of key images.

If you're skimming and scanning and just looking for key images that stick out to you, will often be quite a personal choice.

One that seemed to stick out to a lot of people was this phrase "25 men tight packed." So the idea that what Wilfred Owen is experiencing in the trench, 25 other men were there as well.

This phrase tight packed really conveys the smallness of the space.

Other people said that a word that really jumped out to me was this word agony.

So at one point in the letter Wilfred Owen says that what he experienced in the trench was agony.

It was agony of his happy life.

So contrast there, but this phrase really stuck out because it showed the intensity of his emotion.

And others saying, what really stuck out to me was some of the facts and figures.

So we've got the idea of there are 18 bombers.

We've got the idea of the depth of the water.

We've got the idea that it took Wilfred Owen a long time to move just 150 yards, which is not a long distance at all, so these key facts and figures in his letter trying to convey to his mother just exactly what happened to him in this trench.

We've got a range of ideas, and just nice general exploration at the beginning, after that skimming and scanning, well done.

So we're gonna move on to our second learning cycle now.

And we've got a good handle on this letter and its main idea, the idea that Owen experienced something really terrible in a trench, it was very difficult for him, and he's conveying this experience to his mother.

Now we're going to do a close reading, so our second stage of the reading.

Now close reading is the opposite of skimming and scanning.

So skimming and scanning, it's quickly reading text.

Close reading is rereading parts of a text slowly.

Skimming and scanning is understanding the gist, whereas close reading is understanding its finer points, skimming and scanning, understanding the overall tone, whereas close reading is understanding shifts in tone.

And skimming and scanning, selecting some words, images and phrases, and close reading is analysing words, images, and phrasing, so pausing and thinking, what is the effect of this particular method that the writer has used? Now Jacob completes a close reading of this paragraph.

He's done a skimming and scanning, but now he does a close reading.

And here's the paragraph that he has done his close reading on.

It's where Owen writes, "My dug-out held 25 men tight packed.

Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.

One entrance had been blown in and blocked.

So far, the other remained.

The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn't.

Those 50 hours were the agony of my happy life." So it starts off, Jacob starts off annotating this moment here.

We've got 25 men, water filled to a depth of one or two feet, in say four feet of air.

And he says, well, it starts off with facts.

Owen is striving for accuracy.

He then looks at this phrase "So far, so far the other remained." And he notes that this introduces tension through the phrase "so far," the idea that this might not remain, that actually the other side of the trench, the other entrance might be blown in and blocked too.

And finally "Those 50 hours were the agony of my happy life." There's a contrast between agony and happy to emphasise distress, but also the factual tone of earlier, there's a clear focus on suffering.

So you can see how Jacob has returned to some ideas that he might have originally noted when he did some skimming and scanning, but he's now developed his responses.

So a lot of you looked at that word agony, and here Jacob has dwelt on that for a bit longer.

And he's had a little think about, well, why did Owen phrase it in this way? What's he trying to convey to his mother? Now I'd like you to discuss, just looking at this section, what else would you advise Jacob to annotate to develop his close reading? Is there anything in there that you think, actually, I think Owen is trying to convey this particular thing through this particular method? So pause the video and discuss this question now.

Welcome back, some really fantastic ideas.

There are lots of things you want Jacob to add to his annotations.

So some people focused on this phrase, "One entrance had been blown in and blocked." So this alliteration here with these powerful constants, B and B, so conveying the idea of this entrapment.

And then this phrase here, "The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn't," in some ways it seems very factual.

It's not trying to convey anything particularly about the Germans.

It seems not quite to do with war in some ways.

But then we've got that contrast of the "50 hours were the agony of my happy life." Again, it's quite a short, sharp statement, but that contrast really, really conveys the intendancy and the horror of that experience for Wilfred Owen.

So we're going to have a little pause before we do some close reading ourselves, just so we understand the purpose of doing this close reading.

What is the purpose of close reading in text? Is it a, developing and understanding of the gist, b, developing an understanding of shifts in tone, or c, developing an understanding of a writer's methods? Pause the video and select your responses now.

Well done if you selected b and c.

So it's all about developing this idea of shifts in tone, so not just getting one tone but actually thinking there are some differences here.

So we see Wilfred Owen move from a tone which expresses just facts to one that really clearly expresses his suffering.

And then really looking at closely at writer's methods.

It is a nonfiction text, but still Wilfred Owen's made some very careful choices about what he's writing in order to try and convey his experience to his mother.

And it's not about developing an understanding of gist.

We need to go a bit deeper than that at this point.

So our second practise task then, complete a close reading of Wilfred Owen's 1917 letter to his mother.

And you're gonna use Jacob's annotations as a model.

Now you were able to develop these annotations earlier in this learning cycle.

We're now gonna move to a different section of the letter.

We're gonna look at the whole letter, and you're gonna create annotations for every single paragraph.

And give this task the time it deserves.

With skimming and scanning, we can move quickly.

We can get the overall ideas.

It's a very important stage of our reading.

But with close reading, we need to make sure we slow down a little bit and really appreciate the writer's craft.

So I'll see you back here shortly after you've completed a close reading of Wilfred Owen's 1917 letter to his mother.

Pause the video and complete the task now.

Welcome back.

It was lovely to see people returning to Wilfred Owen's letter.

And to see those short, sharp annotations that you made in learning cycle one really help you to develop, that you could rely on them during your close reading, and then you could develop them into these annotations, the detail a bit like Jacob's annotations that we had on the board as a model.

Now here is a further set of annotations from Jacob.

He's looking at the section of the letter where Owen is talking about the puddles, the water in the trenches.

And it says "Men have been known to drown in them.

Many stuck in the mud and only got on by leaving their waders, equipment and in some cases their clothes.

High explosives were dropping all around out, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes." So really atmospheric, Owen really trying to convey what it might be like to fight in these particular conditions, so the trenches themselves, mud of the trenches being as difficult as fighting the enemy.

Now Jacob wrote, while this first sentence, "Men have been known to drown in them," it's a stark fact about the realities of trench warfare.

And Owen doesn't shy away from telling his mother this in his letter.

We've got a list.

So men get stuck in the mud.

This is what they have to leave behind, precious equipment, their waders, so these long Wellington boots, equipment, and in some cases their clothes.

So the listing showing the overwhelming capacity of the mud that it really could kill them, and soldiers were prepared to leave everything behind in order to escape it.

And then high explosives are dropping all around as machine guns spluttered every few minutes.

There's some onomatopoeia here.

We've got this S sound, we've got this P sound to create a sense of the sounds that Owen is experiencing, so spluttering and dropping.

And we know it's a very muddy environment, and these P sounds seem to echo that a little bit as well.

So a really nice set of annotations here from Jacob, really exploring how Owen conveys the horror of trench warfare in this letter to his mother.

Now I'd like to self-assess your own annotations, ensuring you have a focus on Owen's methods and their effects, and not just thinking what is he saying, but really thinking, how is he saying this? You can use Jacob's annotations there as a further model.

But pause and just self-assess your annotations, ensuring you have a focus on Owen's methods.

Pause the video and complete the self-assessment now.

Well done.

Welcome back.

And well done for just going through each of those annotations and thinking, have I got a real basis here, a real understanding of the methods that Owen is using, and just double checking that you've looked at things like metaphor, because there are a couple in that letter, looking at the really careful verb choice that Owen has throughout in order to convey his experiences.

So you've now got a really lovely detailed set of annotations, and you had the first ones from the skimming and scanning, and then the second one from that close reading.

So the idea of returning to a text and developing your annotations, that is crucial, crucial skill as a student of English.

In summary, Wilfred Owen, 1893 to 1918, was a British poet and soldier.

He's best known for his stark, unflinching and graphic poems about World War I.

Making predictions about what a text might be about is a helpful preparatory step before reading something.

Skimming and scanning a text involves quickly reading something, and gathering its main ideas and overall tone.

And close reading involves carefully considering a writer's methods and their effects.

It's been a real pleasure to practise the skimming and scanning and close reading with you today, and I look forward to seeing you next time.