How Myths and Legends supports Year 5 English

Objectives Year 5 Unit 2 / How Myths and Legends supports this objective
1. Speaking / ·  Tell a story using notes designed to cue techniques, such as repetition, recap and humour / ·  Record a story directly to the myths and legends site using a webcam
2. Listening and responding / ·  Identify different question types and evaluate their impact on the audience / · 
4. Drama / ·  Reflect on how working in role helps to explore complex issues
·  Perform a scripted scene making use of dramatic conventions / ·  Pupils could work in role to give ‘their side’ of the story via a webcam recording
·  Pupils could perform or animate a scripted scene in order to explore and evaluate their use of dramatic conventions. The finished video, podcast(sound file) or animated film could be submitted to the Myths and Legends website
7. Understanding and interpreting texts / ·  Make notes on and use evidence from across a text to explain events or ideas
·  Explore how writers use language for comic and dramatic effects
·  Compare different types of narrative and information texts and identify how they are structured / ·  The text for stories in the ‘Our Myths and Legends’ section is displayed on screen as the story is played. This text can also be copied to a word processor and either displayed on screen as a text file or printed out.
·  The use of language within the stories in the ‘Our Myths and Legends’ section is rich is comic and dramatic effects as the stories are written to entertain! Pupils could look for examples of ‘spooky language or how the writer/ narrator builds tension through the use of language.
8. Engaging with and responding to texts / ·  Compare the usefulness of techniques such as visualisation, prediction and empathy in exploring the meaning of texts / ·  ‘Our Myths and Legends’ can be set to advance automatically or the user can choose to advance each ‘slide’ manually. If the story were shared with a class or group of pupils this would enable pupils to predict what might happen next.
9. Creating and shaping texts / ·  Reflect independently and critically on their own writing and edit and improve it / ·  When stories created with Story Creator 2 are saved they are saved to the E2BN web servers not to the local machine or school server. This means that pupils can return to their stories whenever they like – at home or at school. Until a story is submitted it can be edited and improved.
10. Text structure and organisation / ·  Experiment with different narrative forms and styles to write their own stories
·  Adapt sentence construction to different text-types, purposes and readers / ·  ‘Myths and Legends’ supports the writing of narrative in any style.
·  The site supports a variety of text types – stories could be submitted as poetry, animated presentation or narrative.
11. Sentence structure and punctuation / ·  Experiment with the order of sections and paragraphs to achieve different effects
·  Punctuate sentences accurately, including using speech marks and apostrophes / ·  The storyboard facility in Story Creator 2 allows pupils to re-organise sections of story. As with any electronic text, text can be copied and moved between different parts of the storyboard.
·  Pupils and teachers should be mindful that pupil created stories published on the ‘Myths and Legends’ site are not checked for spelling or grammar mistakes by the website owners. We only check that the content of user submitted stories is not ‘inappropriate’. Pupils need to know that their stories can be viewed by a wide audience and that they should take care that their work is completed to a publishable standard. Teachers can, through the administration system; check and edit their pupils’ work before it is published and that they can remove their pupils’ work from the site at any time.
12. Presentation / ·  Adapt handwriting for specific purposes, for example printing, use of italics
·  Use a range of ICT programs to present texts, making informed choices about which electronic tools to use for different purposes / ·  The Myths and legends website supports a number of different narrative forms – pupils can use the Story Creator 2 to develop stories that include images, animated images, sound effects, written text and voice recording. They can create ‘videoblogs’ by recording their story directly to a webcam. The site supports the up load of text documents, PowerPoint presentations, sound recordings (podcasts) animations and video.

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