Private Peaceful - Chapter 7 Lesson (Michael Morpurgo)

This resource is designed to be used with Chapter 7 of the novel Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. This chapter is titled ‘Twenty-Eight Minutes Past One’. The is the final chapter set in the home village as they Peaceful boys leave for war at the end of the chapter. It is also the final chapter in which Molly, Mother Peaceful and The Colonel play a central role so they are a focus of this lesson.

This resource contains a powerpoint presentation that is used to complete a pre-reading discussion, to check the pupils’ comprehension of this chapter and to generate a discussion whether the pupils think Molly, Mother Peaceful and The Colonel are ‘good’ characters or not. As a teacher, you can decide if you want ‘good’ to mean good in terms of their morals or if you want it to mean effective as a character.

This resource also includes some worksheets. These contain a lesson(s) plan, 3 activities and some extension work. The first activity asks pupils to work in a group/pair and to discuss who are their favourite 3 characters and why. They can record their ideas on the worksheet for this activity . The second activity asks the pupils to write whether they think Molly, Mother Peaceful and The Colonel are ‘good’ characters and give reasons for their answers. This activity follows on from the class discussion on the powerpoint presentation. This third activity is an extended writing task which asks the pupils to write a character description of Molly, Mother Peaceful or The Colonel. They are given some tips on what they could include before they write. In the extension activity, pupils are given 10 actions that characters in the novel have done so far. They are asked to use a thesaurus to find suitable adverbs to describe how the characters do these actions.

This resource should take at least two lessons to complete, but it could be used for more depending on how much time you allow for the discussions. The extension work could also be used as a whole class activity or as homework.

Please look at our other Private Peaceful lessons in this series.