English: Role-Play and Using Speech

This half term, we have been studying the Invention of Hugo Cabret. 

In our recent meeting, we met the character ‘Uncle Claude’. He’s not the nicest of men and has been quite unkind to our protagonist, Hugo. Before this, Hugo had lost his father in a fire and had to go and live with Uncle Claude. On Monday, we looked at characterising him, thinking about the shots that could have been used in the book (as there are lots of great sketches to accompany the writing, but we haven’t seen one for Claude). As we read about him, we even sketched our own versions of him, based on the description alone. We thought that his facial expressions would’ve been seen in a close-up, whilst his mannerisms and body language would be noticed from a long-shot. We described him as moody, lazy, strict and slumped!

On Tuesday, in groups, we considered a new scene. We found out that we’d be writing a ‘flashback’ or a lost chapter based on Uncle Claude’s relationship with Hugo. We were given a few ideas such as Claude teaching Hugo how to steal, or forcing him to sleep on the floor. In our groups, we had a director and at least two actors. Together, we had to come up with how to act out this scene. Some of us created scripts and we had to think about body language, speech, voice and facial expressions. We did a great job at creating totally new scenes and were incredibly creative!

Later in the week, we planned out our chapter with a little more structure. We considered the characters (and described them), the plot progression and the resolution of cliff-hanger that might be involved. Our main focus when writing was ensuring that we punctuated our speech properly. We did a SPaG lesson as a reminder of these rules. We know that we need to use inverted commas to punctuate speech, as well as capital letters and commas/exclamation marks or question marks inside the closing inverted comma! We were also reminded that with these rules, each new speaker should have a new line.

We used a model example to remind ourselves of the type of language and third-person that is used in the Invention of Hugo Cabret. This also gave us inspiration for the description that we could try to incorporate into our own chapters too. From here, it was up to us to write our own chapters inspired by our acting and our planning process. Today, on World Book Day no less, we have finished off our chapters and have peer-reviewed and edited our writing, focusing particularly on the punctuation of our speech.

What was your favourite part of this week’s English lessons?