Boys' writing: Year 3 'The Iron Giant'

Date of issue:	Sep. 2004
Theme:	Raising boys' achievement
Audience:	Key Stage 2 teachers

LEA: Birmingham

School context
A two-form entry primary school (age range 3 to 11) in Handsworth Wood, Birmingham. Intake is approximately 50% Indian/Pakistani, 33% black/Caribbean and 17% white or mixed race. Approximately 38% of children have English as an additional language.

Class context
A literacy class of 30 Year 3 children entering the year group with ability levels ranging from W (one statemented child) to 2A.

Reasons for choosing focus children
The six boys were chosen for the following reasons.

• They had all achieved 2C in writing in the key stage 1 National Curriculum tests.
• They were not making the progress needed to achieve the target I had set them for the end of Year 3.
• Four out of the six (Inderjit, Mohammed, Suneil, and Gurmit) rarely voluntarily joined in with class discussions.
• Three out of the six (Inderjit, Mohammed and Gurmit) needed constant 'encouragement' to put their ideas down on paper.
• Jorel, Suneil and Amrik tried hard with their writing, but their literacy skills were still not showing enough improvement.

Reasons for choosing focus objectives, text types and outcomes

• The objectives were chosen because the school uses the NLS planning blocks and the narrative writing objectives for the half-term seemed to fit with the use of visual texts. (See below for exactly how the objectives were covered in the work that followed the visual texts.)
• The Iron Giant and Matilda were chosen mainly due to the fact that I could also use parts of the original texts by Ted Hughes and Roald Dahl in order to extend the children's knowledge of vocabulary and author techniques after they had experienced and enjoyed whole stories on screen. Babe - Pig in the City was only used to teach some of the vocabulary of film and the class did not watch the whole of this story.
• The outcomes (writing character descriptions and story openings) were chosen because the children in the focus group needed to improve their use of descriptive and adventurous vocabulary, their understanding of character and their story-writing techniques. The outcomes in the second block (writing a persuasive letter and newspaper report) reinforced and extended their understanding of character and their ability to structure a story because they were required to retell events in role.

Visual/drama strategies used during the project
The children completed work based on The Iron Giant, Matilda and Babe - Pig in the City. The first week's objectives were to look at characters' feelings and behaviours, and to give an account of an event in role as a character from a story. To begin with, the children watched the scene in Matilda when Matilda starts school and first meets Miss Trunchbull in the playground. It fitted extremely well because the director only gives the audience glimpses of Miss Trunchbull at first, while the other children describe her to Matilda, so the class were able to use their imagination before they were presented with the actual character on screen. This led to looking at how Roald Dahl used similes in his description, collecting appropriate adjectives by using a 'zone of relevance board' and then writing a piece of description about Miss Trunchbull. Later in the week, the children watched the scene when Matilda makes the newt jump onto Miss Trunchbull. The class then set up a court scene with a judge (myself), jury and witnesses (children acting as the characters in the scene - including the newt) and each character gave an account of what they had seen.

The objectives for the second and third weeks were to look at author technique, write an opening using language to create effects and to learn some key vocabulary of film. The opening scenes of Babe - Pig in the City were used to show the children the difference between a close-up, medium-distance and wide shot. The children drew an example of each type of shot and discussed what the effect of each shot had been. Next, the class watched the forest scene in The Iron Giant. This led to the children retelling this scene by describing the forest, attempting to recreate the tense atmosphere, and introducing the Iron Giant using some of Ted Hughes' techniques for creating suspense. The drama that came from this film, in the second block of planning, included acting in role to persuade the general not to fire the bomb and presenting a news report on the final events of the film. This led to the class writing a persuasive letter and newspaper report, recounting the same event in different ways and distinguishing between a first person and third person account.

Impact on children and their writing
The immediate impact on the children was an increased interest and enthusiasm for the work they were doing. They were stimulated by the use of video texts which they were familiar with and could access instantaneously.

The first improvement in their work was in the way the boys could 'read' the visual text, inferring details about the setting and characters that they previously hadn't done when discussing written texts. For example, after watching the forest scene in The Iron Giant, Amrit was asked whether or not he would use the adjective 'warm' to describe the setting. He explained clearly that he 'wouldn't use warm because the little boy in the film had a thick coat on and a hat, so it must have been cold'.

In addition, after using visual texts, the boys demonstrated a greater understanding of characters' motives and feelings than they had done previously. They were more perceptive when describing characters in their written work as they had a visual image of the character from the screen placed in their mind and could draw on the actions of the characters on the screen for their descriptive writing. For example, their descriptions of Miss Trunchbull, the headmistress in Roald Dahl's Matilda, brought her character to life as they had a good grasp of the type of person she was. They were also able to refer to the films when discussing characters and often asked questions about why characters had acted in a particular way, leading to further discussion in which they explored possible answers to these questions.

The impact on their writing was mainly in their use of much more interesting, adventurous and appropriate vocabulary, as is particularly evident in the examples of their pieces describing the forest in The Iron Giant. I think this was partly due to being able to refer to the visual text they had seen, but I would also put it down to a realisation that a writer must describe the setting in order to create an atmosphere, in the same way as the director created an atmosphere in the scene they had watched. By the end of the six-week block of work based on visual texts, five out of the six boys had progressed by one sub-level in their writing. Only Darwinder showed no progress from start to finish, although he missed two of the six weeks due to chicken pox.

Appendix 1: Sample of children's writing