Inspired by: Flotsam - Week 4

The week's learning centres around the exploration of play scripts and their adaptation for performance, focusing on the story "Flotsam." In one activity, students delve into the intricacies of dialogue and stage direction through a scene where Jack, a young boy, interacts with a lifeguard while his parents offer moral support. This scene from the play script captures a sunny day at the beach, with Jack's parents encouraging him to approach the lifeguard about a mysterious camera he has found. The lifeguard's dismissive response and Jack's hesitant questioning set the stage for a pivotal moment in the story. Students are invited to extend the script, imagining and writing what might happen next before bringing the scene to life by acting it out and filming their performance.

In another part of the week's activities, the focus shifts to refining writing skills, specifically the use of pronouns and nouns to maintain cohesion and avoid repetition. The scenario presented involves Jack discovering an undeveloped film inside the camera and rushing to a camera shop to get it processed. Through group discussion and model writing, students are challenged to rephrase a sentence that overuses the pronoun 'it', enhancing clarity and flow. Additionally, they explore the use of the past perfect tense to express the passage of time and causality. After observing illustrations of Jack waiting for the film to develop, students practise constructing sentences that reflect his growing impatience, starting from ten minutes up to an hour, using this grammatical form to convey the narrative sequence effectively.