Notes:
• This lesson is designed to be delivered using whichever literacy skills focus you are working on at the time. This ensures it can be delivered at any point within the literacy curriculum. Therefore, prior to the lesson you will need to consider which skills you would like to get students to focus on. This gives an opportunity to focus on using some of the grammar outlined in the curriculum including:

– KS1: Joining words and clauses, prefixes, suffixes, basic sentence punctuation, subordination, co-ordination, noun phrases, progressive verbs and present or past tense.

– KS2: prefixes, consonants, vowels, word families, conjunctions, adverbs, prepositions, headings, subheadings, inverted commas, noun phrases with modifying adjectives, paragraphs organised by theme, inverted commas, apostrophes, relative clauses, modal verbs, poems, short stories, adverbials, brackets, dashes, commas, informal and formal speech, passive sentences, adverbials, ellipsis, colons, semi-colons and bullet points.

• Subsequently, this task can also be scaffolded to support the needs and abilities of the class.

Lesson Objective:

• To use a variety of writing techniques to write about the history of a match-seller.

Suitable for pupils working at:

Key stage one and two levels

Preparatory tasks prior to delivery:

• Decide on which skill(s) you wish for the class to focus on when writing
• Check you have access to the production film
• Optional: print the provided writing frame for students to use when producing their final draft of work

Task One:

As a class you can recap the chosen skill, how it should be used in a piece of writing. Then model an example of task two as a class on the board which embeds the use of the key skill(s).

Task Two:

KS1

Ask students to re-watch the scene where the Donnarumma family are enjoying their Christmas celebrations, and the little match girl is left outside in the cold. The scene begins at 30:34 and ends at 36:05.

Get students to write about the scene while embedding the chosen key skill(s). You may wish to consider doing this in the form of a short story, poem or memoir of one of the characters. Again, your choice of written format can be scaffolded to support students’ needs and abilities.

KS2

Ask students to write about the history of a match-seller while embedding the chosen key skill(s). You may wish to consider doing this in the form of a short story, poem, journal, biography or newspaper article. Again, your choice of written format can be scaffolded to support students’ needs and abilities.

Students can write final drafts using the writing frame provided for their final show and tell presentation.

Task Three (optional):

Invite students to share their writing with the class.