Lesson video

Hi there, Mr. Barnesly here, fantastic to see you.

Thank you for joining me in today's lesson.

So we continue to look at fiction writing.

Writing narratives, writing descriptively, and we've been focusing on creating these really malevolent, horrible characters.

In today's lesson, we're gonna be doing some planning.

We're really gonna think about how we can plan an excellent piece of writing.

You're gonna need to make sure you've got access to the additional materials 'cause there's a model answer that we're gonna read together later in today's lesson.

All right, I'm really excited for us to get started today.

This is gonna be a really creative lesson and I'm really interested to see which kind of malevolent characters you are going to be creating today.

All right, once you are ready, let's dive in and get started.

Let's have a look at today's outcome then, shall we? So by the end of today's lesson, you're gonna be able to plan a piece of fiction writing using a success criteria.

So some words that we're gonna look out for today, they are keywords in today's lesson.

They are engaging, plan, structure, deceive, and a single paragraph outline.

So engaging is work that really captures or keeps your interest.

We're gonna be aiming to create some really engaging bits of writing today.

We're gonna be focused on planning and this is like a proposal for something that you intend to do.

So we're gonna be like mapping out what we're intending to do.

Structure is the organisation of our writing.

So we're gonna really focus on our structure today.

And deceive is gonna be part of the task and that's to cause someone to believe something that is not true.

Now a single paragraph outline is something's gonna help us with our structure, but we will talk about that later in the lesson.

So keep an eye out for all of these words as they appear.

So we're gonna be planning some fiction writing today and it's gonna be focused on a malevolent character.

We're gonna start the lesson by reading a model answer and seeing what it's done well.

And then we're gonna use that as an inspiration to help us plan our own writing.

So let's start by reading a model answer.

So we're gonna be focusing on what makes an engaging piece of fiction and we're gonna be doing this through the lens of writing to describe a malevolent character what they look like.

So what do you think an engaging piece of writing might look like? What might it include? Let's take a moment to pause the video and if we've got a partner, we can discuss with them.

Otherwise, we can just think through this independently.

What would you expect to see in a piece of engaging writing? Pause video, give yourself some time to think and press play when you've got some ideas.

Welcome back.

I heard some lots of great ideas going back and forth there.

Lots of you kind of creating a list.

I wonder if you said anything that you could see on screen.

This is not an exhaustive list, this is not in everything, but here are some of the things that you might have said.

So you might have talked about words being chosen, really specifically, really thinking about the effect of all of your vocabulary choices.

You might talked about some figurative language like similes and metaphors, those things that really create the images in our mind.

Really well done if you said show and not tell, we don't want to just really explicitly say this has happened, this has happened.

We want to show the emotion, show the mood of our text.

I heard lots of you talking about sensory imagery.

Remember those five senses, touch, taste, see, sound, and smell like really thinking about transporting our reader so they can really have these vivid clear images in their mind of what we're describing.

Some of you talked about the use of juxtaposition, put those contrasts together.

I really liked those of you saying reflection of the character's personality and emotions, and some of you even went a step further and said you might have done that through setting.

Some of you talked about the importance of powerful verbs and adverbs and how they can really tell us more about the character.

And you also talked about dialogue and you might have even mentioned verbs and adverbs alongside dialogue 'cause all of those things together can tell us lots about characters and their malevolence.

So here are just some of the things that you may have said.

Of course, you may have said some other, you might have had some other ideas as well.

But well done if you said anything that you can see on the screen.

Now, we could take these answers that we've just gone through together and we could turn them in into a success criteria.

And if we did, a success criteria might look something like this.

We want our work to establish character and setting.

We want to use dialogue which uses effective verbs and adverbs.

We want appropriate use of sensory imagery to reflect the character.

We want use of juxtaposition to contrast characters, the good and the bad.

We want to use show and not tell to describe characters and their emotions.

We want to use original similes and metaphors, we want to avoid cliches.

And we want to have a really effective and accurate use of a paragraph structure to help us build suspense.

So that's kind of putting all of those ideas together.

And now we've got a really clear success criteria.

However, this is just a reminder that a success criteria should only always work as a guide and be part of our planning process in deciding what you want to include.

But it is okay to discard some of this and say, actually this might not work for my ideas.

Yes, we would probably want to try and include as much of this as possible, but if you said, look, I don't want to include all five of the senses, it's just not going to work, that's fine.

If you say, actually, I'm only having one central character here, so I might not do that much juxtaposition 'cause in my work or the work that I'm gonna write today or plan today, I'm actually only concentrating on introducing one character and therefore, juxtaposition to contrast characters just is not gonna work and I'm not gonna do it for the sake of it.

So remember, a success criteria is a guide to help us plan our work.

But it is not A, you must, must, must include every single bullet point because we don't want to train shoehorn kind of force anything into our work that isn't going to work or might not work with the ideas that we have.

So let's check to see how we're getting on then.

True or false.

In order for a piece of writing to be engaging, it must do everything that's on a success criteria.

Is that true or false? And think about why you've selected the answer that you have.

All right, pause the video, answer this question and press play when you think you have got the correct answer.

Welcome back.

Well done if you said that was false and you might have justified that by saying something like, a success criteria as a guide of what should be included in your work.

Sometimes not everything on a success criteria will be appropriate for what you are working on.

And so you should pick and choose carefully what you want to include.

All right, really well done if you've got that correct.

All right, we're gonna read a model answer.

This is available in your additional materials and in this model answer, we're going to see a piece of work which describes a malevolent character revealing a secret.

All right, I'm gonna turn the camera off for this because I want everyone following along.

I want you to be following the words on the page, not watching the video.

All right, so I'm turning the camera off now.

Everyone should now hopefully have their additional materials in front of them.

And let's follow along as we read through this together.

In the dimly lit living room, Clara sat on the worn-out couch, flipping through an old photo album.

The walls were lined with bookshelves and the air smelled faintly of musty paper.

Her eyes glisten in the candlelight as she turned the page and sighed.

Her older brother, Max, padded across the room towards her, his footsteps soft on the wooden floor.

"Hey Clara, what you looking at?" Max asked leaning over her shoulder.

His tone was casual, but his jaw was tense.

"Just some old photos," Clara replied smiling up at him.

"Remember this one? I tripped to the seaside." Max nodded, his smile, not quite reaching his eyes.

"Yeah, good times." He sat down next to her taking the album from her hand and turning a few pages.

"Clara, I need to tell you something," he said.

His voice dropping to a whisper.

Clara looked at him with a frown, her heart beginning to race.

This wasn't like him.

"What is it?" Max took a deep breath, his expression darkening.

"You remember that night when mum's jewellery went missing? Everyone thought it was a burglar.

." Clara nodded slowly confusion and fear mingling in her eyes.

"Yes, but they never found out who did it." Max leaned closer.

His voice cold.

"I did it Clara.

I needed the money.

I stole her jewellery." Clara's eyes widened in shock.

"You did what?" She stammered.

Her voice barely a whisper.

Max's face twisted into a sinister smile.

"And if you ever tell anyone, I'll make sure they think it was you." Clara's heart shattered.

All right, welcome back.

Some absolutely fantastic following along going on there.

Well done.

All right, let's take a moment then to think about what is our first impression of the extract? Do you think it's a successful and engaging piece of writing? So pause the video now and if you've got a partner, you can share some ideas.

You can discuss this question between you.

What did you like? What was successful about it? What was engaging? What are your first impressions? If you're working by yourself, don't worry, you can still pause the video.

Have a think, have a think through to yourself.

All right, pause the video.

Let's take a moment to reflect on what we've just read.

Does it make a successful and engaging piece of writing? Over to you.

Welcome back.

I could hear lots of you starting to dive into some of the specifics.

So I want to introduce our first task of today's lesson.

You're gonna now reread the model answer independently, which describes this malevolent character revealing a secret, which we know is in our additional materials.

And then if you've got a partner, you can discuss where does this model answer meet the success criteria? Find some examples to help support your discussion.

If you're working by yourself, you can do this independently.

Either way, you might wish to have a pen to hand 'cause you might even want to start annotating the model answer.

So let's have a quick reminder of the success criteria.

So we want a text that establishes character and setting.

We want some dialogue in there which uses effective verbs and adverbs to give us more information about the characters.

We want appropriate use of sensory imagery to reflect the characters.

See if we can use some juxtaposition to contrast between two characters.

We want to be using show not tell, describing the characters and their emotions.

We want some original similes and metaphors and we might look out to see if we can see a really effective and accurate use of paragraph structure to help build that suspense.

Okay, pause video now.

In pairs or independently, where does this model answer meet our success criteria? Annotating if you wish.

All right, pause video, give it a go and press play when you think you're done.

Welcome back.

I heard some really fantastic discussions there.

So lots of annotations.

So I hope you agree that this piece of writing really met our success criteria.

Let's have a look at some of the things that you might have identified then, shall we? So for character and settings established, we see that right at the beginning when Clara is at home in paragraph one.

And there was some real sensory imagery with it helps set that scene.

So well done if you identified that.

There's lots of dialogue, particularly in paragraph two and three, but actually, there's some really great use of powerful verbs and adverbs like "replied smiling" and "dropping to a whisper." Both of these show the characters and the difference in the characters between Clara and her brother Max.

Now the paragraphs follow that TiPTop structure including a new line for dialogue and each paragraph links to the one before that we are really clearly being taken on a journey.

And you might notice that things have been revealed slowly.

So, "show not to tell," "heart beginning to race," okay? That we're seeing that Clara is feeling a bit anxious about what's going on.

She feels unsure about what her brother's about to say to her.

And "sinister smile," okay? Without saying Max is evil, Max has done terrible things explicitly, we use some of our description there to kind of show that this isn't just someone who's made a mistake and taken things that didn't belong to him because he was panicked and he needed the money.

There's something much more sinister at the heart of this that which is that he's willing to pin the blame on his sister to clear his name.

So, and we've talked about a little bit about juxtaposition, we see that in their speech.

But throughout, you get this juxtaposition of Clara's innocence in comparison to Max's malevolence.

So did you find there was any criteria that wasn't met? Was there anything in this that wasn't met? Pause the video, have a think and press play when you think you've got an answer.

Welcome back.

I heard some of you saying that actually, there could have been a little bit more figurative language, there might have been more opportunities for similes or metaphors that the writer could have included, but only where it was appropriate.

We don't want to just fit it in.

So if there was a clear moment we could have done that, that might have made this work even better.

All right, we are now going to move on to planning our own bits of writing.

So you're gonna plan, you're gonna put proposal together of what it is that you're gonna be writing.

And you're gonna be writing about a malevolent character who is deceiving their friends and family.

So let's start then, let's do some thinking.

How might a malevolent character deceive their friends and family and why? Let's try and get some ideas together then, shall we? So if you've got a partner, you can kind of go through some ideas together.

Otherwise, you can just think through this independently.

Pause the video, have a think.

What ideas could you use for this writing prompt? Welcome back, I heard lots of creative ideas then, fantastic to hear you thinking so creatively about how you could tackle this task.

So deception means to lie, to make someone believe something isn't true.

And so I heard some of you talking about like spreading false rumours about their friends potentially to cause trouble.

I heard some of you saying, what about if you faked vulnerability to gain trust? Make people feel sorry for you to manipulate others.

Some of you are saying concealing true intentions.

So maybe acting in a really generous and kind way, but actually, there's some ulterior motives here.

And maybe faking concern or ignorance 'cause you want to gather secrets or information about someone.

So when we're revealing information slowly about a malevolent character, what paragraph structure could we follow? How could we use our paragraphing structure to help us reveal information about a malevolent character? Pause the video, have a think and press play when you've got some ideas.

Welcome back.

Well done.

You might have said, I heard lots of great ideas, you might have said, well, we could start by introducing the character.

We could then build up some suspense, but we want to keep that revealing of the true malevolence of the character until a little bit later on.

We don't want to give it all away at the beginning.

So we're gonna use a single paragraph outline to support the planning of each of section of our work.

I'm gonna remind you just in case you haven't seen what a single paragraph outline is, it looks something like this.

It's a planning tool, where we start with a topic sentence.

The topic sentence is introduce the main idea in our paragraph.

When we're planning this, we will always write this out as a full sentence.

Then we put in the supporting ideas, we do this in note form.

This is a reminder of the kind of vocabulary we might use, the ideas, the things we might want to describe, the techniques we might want to use.

Just a reminder in note form of what we're gonna do to really flesh out our paragraph.

And then it's always worthwhile writing our concluding sentence to which kind of summarises the main ideas of our paragraph.

It's also really useful because when we're writing more than one paragraph, we want our concluding sentence to kind of lead in or have links and connections to the next topic sentence 'cause we know we want cohesion between our paragraphs.

So let's have a look at one of the models from one of the paragraphs from the model answer.

So in the dimly lit living room, Clara sat on the worn-out couch, flipping through an old photo album.

The walls were lined with bookshelves and the air smelled faintly of musty paper.

Her eyes glisten in the candlelight as she turned the page and sighed.

Her older brother, Max, padded across the room towards her, his footsteps soft on the wooden floor.

Let's have a look at what this would look like in a plan then.

So in a single paragraph outline, our topic sentence is telling us that this paragraph is about introducing character and particularly introducing Clara.

So that topic sentence focuses on Clara.

What are the supporting details? Well, I want to kind of set the scene, the bookshelves.

I want to use some sensory imagery, the smell of that kinda musty paper to match the bookshelves.

And I want to have kind of those eyes glistening, 'cause I'm showing, not telling that there's kind of this emotional maybe kind of sadness, nostalgia as she's looking through the photographs.

My concluding sentence focuses on Max because what I'm starting to do is kind of build that connectivity into my next paragraph where we learn a bit more about Max, okay? So kind of my concluding sentence, wrapping it all up is saying, look, there's more than one character in this, Clara and Max.

Okay, true or false.

Every part of a single paragraph outline should be written in full sentences.

Is that true or false? Pause video, decide on your answer and think about why.

Why did you choose true or why did you choose false? Pause video and press play when you think you've got the right answer.

Yeah, well done if you said false, only the topic sentence and concluding sentences of your single paragraph outline need to be in full sentences.

Remember, everything in the middle, the supporting details should be in note form.

All right then, over to you for our final task of the lesson.

We're gonna be planning the single paragraph outlines for each section of your task.

And remember, the task is to write about a malevolent character who is deceiving their friends or family.

A reminder, you're gonna need three single paragraph outlines here.

One, to introduce your character, the second, to build suspense, and the third, to reveal that malevolence.

As you plan, remember to include elements of the success criteria.

And just a reminder, this is what a single paragraph outline looks like.

All right, over to you to do some planning.

I am really excited to see how creative you are going to be with your writing.

All right, pause the video.

Best of luck, press play when you are done.

All right, welcome back.

Some fantastic planning going on there.

I have no doubt when it comes to writing this up, you are gonna be in a fantastic position 'cause you have spent the time doing the planning.

Great job.

Before we finish for today's lesson, let's take a moment to reflect on the plans that we've created and check that they are the best that can possibly be.

So I want you to check that you have written your topic sentence in full, introducing the main idea for each paragraph.

I want to check that you have provided at least three ideas for each section of your writing in your supporting detail.

Have you noted down examples of vocabulary you may wish to use in your paragraph as parts of that supporting detail? Have you made a note of the use of figurative language, the techniques that you and methods that you might want to use to describe your character or the setting? And have you written your concluding sentence in full, reinforcing the main idea of your paragraph and leading to the start of the next one? All right, pause the video now and check your plans against the success criteria on the board.

And remember, if there's anything you haven't done, now is the time to make those changes.

All right, pause the video, reflect on your work and press play when you are done.

Okay, that's it.

We have reached the end of the lesson and what a fantastic lesson you have had.

Really well done, you should be super, super proud of yourself.

On the screen, you can see a summary of everything that we have covered in today's lesson.

Let's go through each of these bullet points one by one to make sure we're feeling really confident and really secure before we move on to our next lesson.

So we've learned that single paragraph outlines are a useful tool for planning writing.

We've learned that when you plan your writing, you should plan the vocabulary that you will use.

We've learned that using figurative and sensory language can create really vivid description.

And we've learned that success criteria connects as an excellent guide to what you could include in your writing.

All right, fantastic work today.

I hope to see you again in one of our lessons in the future.

Have a great day with the rest of your day, however you choose to spend it.

And see you all soon.

Bye-bye.