'The Piano' 2 Weeks English Lessons Plans Resources Display

10 engaging and ready-to-go English lessons responding to and exploring the powerful video clip ‘The Piano’ by Aidan Gibbons found on the Literacy Shed.

Lots of high level questioning to probe deeper into this interesting clip and opportunities for paired, individual and group work.

Week 1 - Explore and respond to the story whilst developing writing skills (Talk for Writing -Imitate and Innovate).
Written for KS2 it covers many relevant teaching points:

• relative clauses,
• expanded noun phrases,
• editing and improving language,
• parenthesis,
• creating an atmosphere,
• showing change within characters,
• describing settings,
• building suspense,
• summarising,
• identifying word classes,
• complex sentences.

Week 2 - Children write their own version of this story using and building on the writing skills learnt in the first week (Talk for Writing - Invent).
The week takes the children through writing the opening, middle and end of their memory story, then editing and publishing it.
Starters include: spellings, adding description, handwriting, editing punctuation and improving words.
Many more teaching points covered:

• types of sentence openers,
• how to start a story,
• building suspense,
• writing effective phrases to show change,
• using synonyms
• using a thesaurus
• peer assessment
• editing punctuation
• editing for sense
• editing to improve

Mixture of starters covering key SPAG elements from the New Curriculum.

There are resources to support the lower ability and daily challenges for the higher ability.

Ability groups in plan:
Green - Low ability
Yellow - Mid/low ability
Blue - Mid ability
Red - High ability.

All reviews welcome.

All resources, plans, PowerPoints and display included.

Display includes:

• Title
• Short explanation of the movie
• Images from the movie
• Powerful descriptive vocabulary cards
• Features list of this genre
• Sentence Opener ideas
• Paragraph Opener ideas
• Key events of movie on arrows for ordering
• Modelled examples of creating an atmosphere
• Modelled examples of expanded noun phrases
• Modelled examples of relative clauses
• Higher level thinking questions