Teachers TV: Literacy - Character Viewpoints

A Key Stage 2 lesson starter on literacy and characterisation, looking at the fairytale of Cinderella. The lesson starter explores how characters change during a story, and how they can have very different perspectives on the same event. It focuses on the ball scene in Cinderella, and features the prince and one of the ugly sisters.

It’s the evening of the ball in the Cinderella Fairytale, and the prince is nervous. He uses the royal video diary room to share his thoughts and feelings about the evening, and as the night unfolds, he returns to the diary room to talk about what is happening on the dance floor. The ball seems to be going as badly as he feared - until a mysterious stranger appears. His diary entries are juxtaposed with those of one of the ugly sisters, who begins the evening very excited and hopeful, but whose night is destroyed when a girl in glass slippers gatecrashes the event.

Using a familiar setting, the lesson starter is designed to support the teaching of characterisation at KS2, linking with the schemes of work for Years 4 and 5. It can be used as a stimulus to explore the differences between characters; what you can tell about them from their clothing and behaviour; what they think and feel; and how and why characters change during a story