Earlier this week we ran the first in our series on The Best Strategies and Resources For Teaching 7-10 English. This workshop focused on strategies for teaching novels and films (buy a recording and the PPT of the workshop here). One of the simple but highly effective teaching strategies we discussed was using pictures or stills from films to help students notice and analyse details about characters, the setting or symbols. This strategy is called notice, name, describe and analyse and works like this:
- Give students a picture/still of a character or setting (you can use tools on your computer such as Screen Grab to take a picture of a scene in a film). Students need to circle 4-5 features or aspects of the character or setting they notice. They then need to name these things. It’s important at this stage that they don’t describe what it looks – but simply name what the feature is.
- In the second step, students brainstorm as many adjectives as they can think of to describe the things they named. This is where their analytic thinking begins because they need to consider what’s interesting or important about how the features they noticed are being presented.
- In the last step, students brainstorm what the features might show us about a character or world. To help with this brainstorming, give students some prompts such as:
This shows us that the character…
is…
feels…
has experienced…
This shows us that the setting of the text…
is…
allows…
makes it difficult for…
The images below provide an example of how to carry our these steps to analyse the costume of Edward Scissorhands.
