Lesson video

Hello, my name's Mr Hutchinson and welcome to our RE lesson, all about Hinduism.

Today we're going to be writing an essay.

And interestingly, just before this lesson, I was reading this book.

It's one of my favourite books it's called A Little History of Religion.

And as I was reading it I was thinking, "This is kind of like a collection of essays".

That's all an amazing nonfiction book is.

it's somebody that knows a subject really well.

And then writes it down in clear detail, explaining to other people about this fascinating topic.

And that's what I'm going to be asking you to do today.

Writing an essay, explaining why Hinduism is unique, what makes it special? What makes it different to other religions? What are some of the key features of it? And I'm sure, just as this book does a great job of explaining different kinds of religion throughout the world and history.

You're going to do a great job at writing an essay explaining Hinduism.

So our lesson, can I write an essay on Hinduism? You will need something to write on and something to write with.

I know that some of you like to write your essays on computers.

If you prefer to do that, then that's absolutely fine.

You can do that.

Many others of you will like to write it the old fashioned way of pen and paper, perhaps into an exercise book.

And it's fine for you to do that too.

This is what our lesson will look like.

First off we're going to ask what is an essay.

We discussed that in our previous lesson, so we'll recap that.

I'm then going to give you some hints of how to write an introduction.

And I'll then show you a structure strip, what's called a structured strip, and that will help you to write your essay.

Then it will be time for you to write.

I'm going to try and keep this lesson as short as possible to give you as much writing time as possible.

'Cause I know it's going to take you a while because you've got so much to write about.

'Cause you knows so much, and that's really cool that you know, so much, it will actually take you ages and lots and lots of paper to write all of this down.

I'll then give you some help with writing your conclusion to cap off all of your assets.

So, first of all, let's remind ourselves what an essay is.

How would you describe an essay? What would you say an essay was? We talked about this in our last lesson.

Great work, so an essay is a piece of writing, a long, usually quite long piece of writing that focuses on one particular subject, a factual piece of writing, and it can be about all sorts of different things.

It can be about anything that you know a lot about.

There's an example there of how you're going to write out in lots of detail, full sentences, key facts to do with this subject of Hinduism.

We usually start an essay with an introduction, which just sets out what the essay is going to discuss.

Not in a lot of detail, that happens in the body of the essay, the main paragraphs, which you've already planned, but the introduction just sort of lets the reader know this is what the essay is going to be about.

These are the sorts of different sections I'm going to be discussing.

Now I'll give you a bit of help with your introduction, a few different versions that I wrote of an introduction and there's no one right way to write an introduction.

So I'll give you a few different examples.

If you want to, you can just copy one down or you can combine them or you can just be inspired by them and write your own one altogether.

Either of those options is fine.

I wrote Hinduism as a unique religion that originated in the Indus Valley over 4,000 years ago.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide follow it.

And it is a religion that has a rich ancient history, many features of Hinduism, make it quite a unique religion, which will be set out alone.

And then I can get started into the essay, 'cause I've already said what it's going to be about.

And I mentioned there the, sort of the question of our essay which is what makes Hinduism unique? Here's another shorter example of a introduction.

This essay aims to outline the unique features of the Hindu religion.

Emerging at around 2000 BCE, Hinduism has grown to include followers all over the world.

Read on and learn more about this fascinating religion.

So that's trying to draw the reader in a little bit more, but also explaining what the essay is going to be about.

My last example, the Hindu religion is unique for many reasons.

In many ways, Hinduism should not be considered as a single religion, but it's a rich collection of ancient beliefs, stories and teachings.

These beliefs were passed down orally from before 2000 BCE.

And first began being written down around 3000 years ago.

So it's time for you to write your introduction.

You can choose any one of those, or you can combine them.

Pause the video and write out your own instruction.

Great work.

Hopefully you've got an introduction now, which is setting out what's going to happen in your essay, what the reader is going to read about.

So it's time to get started into the main ideas of the essay, everything that we've learned all together.

And so we have our plan.

You've got all of your ideas within your plan that you can check back through your notes and you'll know that each of these different ideas will need to be included.

And I've popped some of these key ideas into this as a structure strip.

There's also a worksheet.

If you pause the video and click next, then this is included in a worksheet.

If you prefer to have it on the worksheet, or if you have a printer, you can print it out.

And really what you should be aiming to do is as you write through the section, the information that you write and you sort of pretend that you're explaining these different ideas to somebody that hasn't studied Hinduism before.

The sections that you write should answer these questions.

So if I had these questions, I should get the answers to them by reading your essay.

And that's a good check to make sure that your essay is full of facts.

So there is a structure strip here for the first three paragraphs, and then one here for the second three paragraphs.

You can pause the video at each of those as you write if you'd like to.

But I'm now going to give you some time to pause the video and get going with your essay.

So it's probably going to take you a while and that's absolutely fine.

Enjoy the process of showing off everything, you know, and putting into nice, full sentences everything that you have written.

Pause the video and give that a go now.

Great work.

How did you do? You've got a nice full essay in front of you.

I'm really proud of you.

It's not an easy thing to do and you stuck at it and now I'm sure that you've got something that you're reading through and thinking, "Wow, I wrote that, I know absolutely loads" and you should feel really, really proud of yourself.

So amazing work.

I would love to read them.

I love reading these essays and seeing the different knowledge that you've gained and how you've expressed it in your own unique way, 'cause I'm sure that you got a particular voice that makes explaining these different concepts, really clear and enjoyable to read.

So please do ask your parents or carers to take a photo and post it onto Instagram or Facebook or Twitter and hashtag it with #learnwithoak.

And then I'll be able to read them and so will everybody else.

And we'll have lots of different essays about Hinduism to show everybody everything we've learned and to show everybody so that other people can learn about this religion.

Amazing work.

We've got one more lesson left in a sequence.

And in our next lesson, we're going to be improving essays.

So I'll give you a few tips of some common sort of errors or some common ways to improve essays.

So make sure you hang onto that essay.

So in our next lesson, you have it there and you can just make a few adjustments to it, to make it even better.

But well done for working so hard.

Really, really impressed with you and you should feel really proud of yourself.

I'll see you in our next and fun lesson.