Reply To: Roald Dahl’s five books:The Twits etc
Summary for lesson 9:
What did we cover
– Discussed the homework tasks and what we did well on/could improve
– Reflected on the last month
– Discussed which book has been our favourite and why
– Did a character study (using illustrations)
– Worked through the questions for the first half of FMF
– Debated whether we feel sorry for the farmers
Class report
It was wonderful to begin work on FMF, as many of the students had said last week that they were incredibly excited to start lessons on the book.
We began by reviewing our work so far (as we have been learning together for a whole month now). I remarked how pleased I have been with the wonderful progress the students have made over the last four weeks; it is so clear that they have gained a lot of confidence, insight,and skills over the past 8 sessions, and it is incredibly exciting to think how much further they will progress over the coming weeks.
We went round and discussed which books we had most enjoyed and why. I was pleased that every book we studied was mentioned at least a few times! The reasons the students gave for their answers were also incredibly interesting; it seems that they enjoy the more ‘challenging’
of Dahl’s books, which is good as we move forward to work on his longer and more complex works.
Next, we did a character study of the key characters in FMF. It is great to see how much better the students are at inferring details about characters from drawings of them, and I believe it is a really useful exercise for us to continue doing at the start of each next set of lessons.
The students were wonderful at providing answers to the VIPERS questions. One thing which I noticed was how much the students enjoy elaborating their answers; rather than just stating the answer in its simplest form, many of the students clearly love to go into more detail about how they came to finding their answers and how it links to the rest of the story. This is absolutely wonderful to see and it will certainly help them when they come to doing English assessments in the future.
We finished by debating whether we felt sorry for the farmers. As usual, the students were lively, engaged, and shared some very interesting ideas. They continue to build upon each other’s answers, which I have been very pleased to see and actively encouraging.
Home work for lesson 9:
Imagine you are one of the farmers. Write a letter of complaint about the problems you have
been having on your farm.
OR
Summarise the first half of the book in 4 sentences.
VIPERS questions for lesson 10 to be discussed on Thur:
