EVENTS

4th Form Story Reading in the Library
Reading in Dorms

THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT - The Week Ahead - by JRRF (Head of English)

The English Department are incorporating the theme of Book Week into their teaching throughout the week. It must be emphasised that we are not disrupting the normal routine, but simply using ‘Doorways’ as a theme for the work during lessons.

Examples of the work planned in various classes are below:

Spellings and Vocabulary work that is linked in some way to Doorways.

A Treasure Hunt adventure story including role play, interesting adjectives, and eventually a piece of descriptive writing.

Poems on the theme.

Doorways-based comprehensions

Reader’s Theatre - A composition created by an entire class with all contributions considered from all boys. The title to be decided by the boys themselves. This teaches compositional, grammatical, punctuation, spelling, vocabulary work: and obviously, communication and teamwork!

An author study based on Wednesday’s visit by Chris Ryan

Non-Fiction e.g. Research on places that Doorways may have been opened to.

Bookitch will continue as normal although there will a double plus ‘bonus’ for Bookitch reports handed in during the week.

JRR Fletcher
Head of English

5A READERS' THEATRE – Doorways

These are titles that the boys thought of for their class story

Will – Never open it!
Ralph – Door of Death/Through the door of Terror
Tony – The Magic Door
Hassanal – Solid. Squeaky. Hard. Wonderdoorway.
Logan – The Unlockable Door. Destination doorways
Osman – Doorway to the Underworld
JJ – Door at 47, D. in the middle of nowhere, back in time, secret door.
Conor – The door of the creature, Midnight door, secret handle.
Spoons – The night of the knock, The door of squeak and terror
Snips – cracked entrance, back door
Stoppsy – Candy shop door, the arrival
Hugo – Knock! Knock! The door with eyes, creaking door, door to dreams,
Edward – to hell, Glass Door, speaking knob, Death to Doors
Daniel - I-Door,
Theo – The Secret Door of Wonder

THE MIDNIGHT DOOR

We have chosen this title as it gives us the option of having a door that only opens and closes once a day and therefore a series of 24-hr stories will be produced.

After the title was confirmed, we discussed characters. It is important not to have too many characters in a story so we voted on whether there should be one or two main characters (the word ‘protagonist’ was introduced) in our story.
Out of 16 boys, 13 voted for two.

We then discussed whether there should be two boys, a boy and a girl, or two girls.
12 voted for a boy and a girl, 4 for two boys.

Finally, we had a vote to see whether they should be related.
12 voted for them not to be related, 4 for them to be family.

By tomorrow’s lesson, they need to have thought of names for both characters.

AFTER LUNCH

Mr Masterman read some of the boys a story in the library. Here he is reading a particularly good bit!

Picture by Mrs Anderson

A MIND MAP

The Mind map below is an example of a brainstorming exercise done by 4H for their story for Book Week. The boys had two options for their title:

1. The Magic Door 
2. A Door to ...

They then had to write down as many ideas as they could without worrying too much about structure or spelling. The results were all a bit of a mess (quite purposely). The next step will be to create a more structured plan.

JRR Fletcher
Head of English

M Shah (10.01)