Take Cover
Teacher sheet
3 Getting the gist
Teacher input required / Medium/some involvementFramework substrand / 5.1 developing and adapting active reading skills and strategies
Lesson level / C
National Curriculum ref. / 2.2a extract and interpret information, events, main points and ideas from texts
2.2b infer and deduce meanings, recognising the writers’ intentions
Learning objective
To develop note-taking skills and to use inference and deduction skills to recognise authorial intent.
Resources required
Student instructions and student resource sheet, exercise books or lined A4 paper, coloured pens/pencils/highlighters (if possible).
Lesson guidance
· Starter – read aloud the short Blackpool text (see Warm up section of the student sheet), and model making bullet point notes to summarise the text. (10 mins)
Your bullet points could be:
· Blackpool is amazing / · Pleasure Beach – 42 acres· more visitors than Greece / · 6.5 million visitors
· eats lots of chips – 40 acres of potatoes each day! / · famous lights
· people wee in doorways!
· lots of rollercoasters
Then read the rest of the text and ask students to summarise it in up to five bullet points. Share responses.
· Development – students recap different methods of note-taking before using them to help them to get to grips with the methods used to entertain in The Lost Continent.
· Plenary – in pairs, students use only their notes to explain to their partner the different ways that Bryson attempts to entertain. They should also discuss the usefulness of the method that they chose. (approximately 10 mins)
Notes for SEN students
The Lost Continent extract is a long piece of text, and contains some difficult vocabulary. For weaker students, it is suggested that they focus on the first four paragraphs.
Extension activities / notes for gifted and talented students
Encourage students to think about what we learn about a) Des Moines, and b) Bill Bryson from this extract. Do they think that he likes the place? What can they gather about his character from the way he writes and what he chooses to write about?
Student instructions
3 Getting the gist
Learning objective
To develop note-taking skills and to use inference and deduction skills to recognise authorial intent.
Success criteria
By the end of the lesson, I will have:
· recapped note-taking techniques
· used these techniques to help to me to understand the author’s intention in writing a text.
Warm up
Read this short text:
Blackpool — and I don’t care how many times you hear this, it never stops being amazing — attracts more visitors every year than Greece and has more holiday beds than the whole of Portugal. It consumes more chips per capita than anywhere else on the planet. (It gets through 40 acres of potatoes a day.) It has the largest concentration of rollercoasters in Europe. It has the continent’s second most popular tourist attraction, the 42-acre Pleasure Beach, whose 6.5 million annual visitors are exceeded in number only by those going to the Vatican. It has the most famous illuminations. And on Friday and Saturday nights it has more public toilets than anywhere else in Britain; elsewhere they call them doorways.
From Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
Now summarise it in up to five bullet points.
Your main task!
1. Read the information below about different ways of taking notes.
2. Read the text about Des Moines from The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson. You are going to focus on the methods that he uses to entertain the reader, some of which are:
· anecdote / · characters· humour / · engaging with the reader
· exaggeration / · irony
3. Using whichever note-taking technique you prefer, take notes which would help you to write a detailed analysis of the methods that he uses to create humour in the text.
Some note-taking techniques you could try include ...
· creating spidergrams, mind maps and flow charts
· underlining or highlighting important points
· using shorter or simpler words
· using colours for different sections
· including diagrams and sketches
· using bullet points, numbered points or lists.
Remember that the notes you are making are for your benefit. Use whichever technique/ techniques you are comfortable with and that will help you understand your notes when you come back to them.
© 2009 Teachit (UK) Ltd 5
Take Cover 3 Getting the gist
Round it off with this
1. Using only your notes, try to explain to your partner the methods Bryson uses to entertain in this extract.
2. Discuss the note-taking method(s) that you chose to use: how effective was it/were they? What were the problems with it/them? If you used different methods, discuss what you think might be the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Extra challenge
1. Think about what we learn about a) Des Moines b) Bill Bryson from this extract.
· Do you think that he likes the place?
· What do you gather about his character from the way he writes and what he chooses to write about?
2. Write the detailed analysis of the methods that he uses to create humour in the text that you have planned and discussed!
Student resource sheet
The Lost Continent
Bill Bryson
I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there for ever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can’t wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there for ever and ever.
Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn’t really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you. People who have nothing to do with Des Moines drive in off the interstate[1], looking for gas or hamburgers, and stay for ever. There’s a New Jersey couple up the street my parents’ house whom you see wandering around from time to time looking faintly puzzled but strangely serene[2]. Everybody in Des Moines is strangely serene.
The only person I ever knew in Des Moines who wasn’t serene was Mr Piper. Mr Piper was my parents’ neighbour — a leering cherry-faced idiot who was forever getting drunk and crashing his car into telephone poles. Everywhere you went you encountered telephone poles and road signs leaning dangerously in testimony[3] to Mr Piper’s driving habits. He distributed them all over the west side of town, rather in the way dogs mark trees. Mr Piper was the nearest possible human equivalent to Fred Flintstone, but less charming. He was a Shriner[4] and a Republican[5] — a Nixon Republican — and he appeared to feel he had a mission in life to spread offence. His favourite pastime, apart from getting drunk and crashing his car, was to get drunk and insult the neighbours, particularly us because we were Democrats[6], though he was prepared to insult Republicans when we weren’t available.
Eventually, I grew up and moved to England. This irritated Mr Piper almost beyond measure. It was worse than being a Democrat. Whenever I was in town, Mr Piper would come over and chide[7] me. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing over there with all those Limeys,’ he would say provocatively[8]. ‘They’re not clean people.’
‘Mr Piper, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I would reply in my affected[9] English accent. ‘You are a cretin.’ You could talk like that to Mr Piper because (1) he was a cretin and (2) he never listened to anything that was said to him.
‘Bobbi and I went to over to London two years ago and our hotel room didn’t even have a bathroom in it,’ Mr Piper would go on. ‘If you wanted to take a leak in the middle of the night you had to walk about a mile down the hallway. That isn’t a clean way to live.’
(continued overleaf)
‘Mr Piper, the English are paragons[10] of cleanliness. It is a well-known fact that they use more soap per capita[11] than anyone else in Europe.’
Mr Piper would snort derisively[12] at this. ‘That doesn’t mean diddly-squat, boy, just because they’re cleaner than a bunch of Krauts[13] and Eyeties[14]. My God, a dog’s cleaner than a bunch of Krauts and Eyeties. And I’ll tell you something else: if his Daddy hadn’t bought Illinois for him, John F. Kennedy would never have been elected President.
I had lived around Mr Piper long enough not to be thrown by this abrupt[15] change of tack. The theft of the 1960 presidential election was a long-standing plaint of his, one that he brought into the conversation every ten or twelve minutes regardless of the prevailing[16] drift of the discussion. In 1963, during Kennedy’s funeral, someone in the Waveland Tap punched Mr Piper in the nose for making that remark. Mr Piper was so furious that he went straight out and crashed his car into a telephone pole. Mr Piper is dead now, which is of course one thing that Des Moines prepares you for.
From The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson
© 2009 Teachit (UK) Ltd 5
[1] motorway
[2] peaceful
[3] proof
[4] a group for men which is committed to community service
[5] one of the main political parties in America
[6] the other main political party
[7] tell me off
[8] to try to get a reaction
[9] pretend
[10] perfect examples
[11] per person
[12] sarcastically
[13] Germans
[14] Italians
[15] sudden
[16] current