Inside My Brain

This would make a nice start-of-term activity, or you could use it in a Learning mentor session or a Nurture Group to get to know your pupils.

Preparation: print out a large outline of a brain for each child, together with a patterned colouring-in page.

Explain they're going to fill their brains with words that describe what's important to them - family members and friends, special places, pets, foods, pastimes. They should aim not to leave many gaps, so if they run out of ideas they can put a word twice or even more. They could vary the size of the words to signify the relative importance or they could write the words in a variety of colours. 

Then they stick the brain onto the patterned paper and colour in around it.

This was a very relaxing session that could have lasted over an hour but we ran out of time. The children are taking their work home to finish and I've asked them to bring them back next week to share (if they want to).

Outrageous Lies About Fruit

My own examples

Y5 work

You will need: a selection of fruit, a carrot and a piece of broccoli.

This session is about observing the qualities of an object, then thinking of antonyms or fantastic deviations from the norm.

I took in a carrot to hold up in front of the group, then read out the poem I'd written about it. The children were making 'Huh?' faces as I read, but I carried on. Next I held up a piece of broccoli and read that poem aloud too. Some of them had guessed what we were going to do, but I explained for the younger students that they were going to choose a piece of fruit and then tell a string of outrageous lies about it.

I laid out the fruit, letting the pupils choose a piece each, then handed them the 'Nine Lies' template. Before they wrote their poems, we did one together so they were completely clear on the structure of the poem. They enjoyed this, excitedly calling out funny adjectives and similes, and giggling at each other's suggestions.

As usual they worked fast - this is a session that can be completed in forty-five minutes - and were keen to read out their bizarre descriptions at the end.

Some More Nice Feedback on my Book

Refugee Week June 17-23

It's Refugee Week soon and I thought I'd post a lesson plan I've been using with my Y5 and 6 pupils. 

I began by asking the children if they knew what a refugee was, then gave out copies of the Elise Gravel cartoon about refugees. This explains very clearly and simply why some people have to leave their home country and move to another place.

Then I played six very short YouTube videos, leaving time after each one for the children to answer some questions (detailed below). The videos are very sad to begin with and I wouldn't use them with a lower Year than 5. They also include a lot of subtitles, so if you have children in your class who find fast reading tricky, make sure you have someone sitting with them who will read the text for them.

Then I gave out photographs of child refugee faces and asked everyone to pick a face and focus on it. That was who they were going to be writing their poem about.

Click here for some beautiful and striking photographs of child refugee faces

For a warm-up, I asked them to think of things which were fragile or easily crushed (glass, bird's eggs, chicken bones etc). Then I asked them to list as many negative emotions as they could think of. Then I asked them to imagine a great big space with something very small in the middle of it, for instance to imagine they were in a hot air balloon flying low over a beach, what kind of tiny objects might they see stranded there? If they were flying over the sea, what small items might be adrift on the waves?

Finally I gave out the templates, below. The second one is for children who find writing more difficult so will appreciate the line being started for them. 

Then the directions are as follows:

1. Write a line about how fragile your refugee's heart is.

2. Write a line about what you see in his/her eyes.

3. Finish the line "Lost as..."

4. Write three adjectives that describe your refugee.

5. Your refugee is holding tightly onto something. What is it? Describe it.

6. What bad dreams does your refugee have at night?

7. What does your refugee long for?

8. If you could give your refugee one thing, what would it be? (If you like, you can specify here, 'Something it's in your power to give', in other words not a house or a thousand pounds, but a kind word or your friendship.)

Half-and-half Stories

For this session, I told the children they were going to start a story, then swap and have someone else finish it off next week. As a stimulus, I put a selection of photos in an envelope: eight faces and four 'hazards'. They were asked to choose one or two characters and one hazard to work with. We discussed possibilities for the hazards, such as the fact that a snake can be venomous OR friendly and someone's much-loved pet. Then I asked them to focus on one character and, working very fast, fill in as many of the gaps on the Character Questions sheet as they could in five minutes. These were designed to give some flesh to the bones rather than form the plot of the story, though they could have been used for either.

This week they have all begun a story, and next week will complete someone else's.