Teach-Primary-Issue-19.4

rolling hills and azure seas, there existed a small coastal village. Its whitewashed houses gleamed under the warm Mediterranean sun, their terracotta roofs adding a splash of vibrant colour to the picturesque landscape. The villagers, going about their daily routines, created a symphony of bustling activity, their voices mingling with the cries of seagulls soaring overhead. Do pupils find this engaging, or is it a little boring? Are we waiting for more pertinent information at any point? What words could we leave out? Stop and go After a brief discussion, you can then model how to speed up and slow down a scene. For example, to slow something down, pupils could: · write in the third or first person · add descriptive language (sights, smells, sounds, taste and touch) · add dialogue · add in what a character is feeling · add in what a character is thinking Slowing a scene down could look like this: Get to the POINT! Cut the waffle and jump right into the heart of a story, by making sure your pupils can pace their writing properly, says Chris Youles “Plotting out a story into scenes is a great starting point when teaching pacing” Perseus is born Thrown in the sea King Polydectes Sets off to kill Medusa Gifts from God Finds Medusa Kills Medusa A lfred Hitchcock once said, “Drama is life with the dull part cut out.” I wish we’d all teach our budding writers this. I’ve lost count of the number of stories that start at the breakfast table and recount the protagonist’s entire day in painful detail. Or stop mid-action just for the characters to go to bed, or for everything to be ‘alright in the end’. Pick your moment The fabled screenwriter William Goldman (1983) said, “You always attack a movie scene as late as you possibly can. You always come into the scene at the last possible moment.” This is also true of story writing; we don’t need a two-page preamble running through the main character’s breakfast, a television show they’ve watched and their journey to school before we get to the exciting part. In essence, stories need to be carefully paced. We sometimes need to slow down to tell the tale in the detail it requires, and sometimes we need to skip whole hours, days, weeks or even years so that we can get back to the part that needs to be told. We often start by telling children that stories have a beginning, middle, and end, but we also need to teach them some basic rules and the help of the gods, Perseus got a shield from Athena and winged sandals from Hermes. He went to the lair of the Gorgons and beheaded Medusa. Victorious, Perseus returned home. Ask pupils what they think the effects are here. Is the story engaging? Do we want to know more? Where could we expand the information? Conversely, if pacing is too slow, the story can end up like this: In the mythical land of ancient Greece, nestled amid strategies so that they are able to plan these stages well. Here are some strategies I’ve found useful to do just that. Break it down If we use the Ancient Greek tale of Perseus and the Gorgons, we can break down the narrative into scenes. Plotting out a story into scenes is a great starting point when teaching pacing. Once they’re all laid out, like in Fig.1 , you can ask pupils which scenes they think they should slow down, and which they should speed up. You can mark the scenes with SD and SU respectively, to show where you’re going to apply specific pacing (see Fig. 2 ). To figure out which parts of the story should be told more slowly, ask the children which parts they really wouldn’t want to miss out on. Prompt them with a discussion, and explain that, for example, in this story, Perseus wants to kill Medusa, and if we speed up Medusa’s death there won’t be any tension in the story, and the ending will fall flat. However, for every other scene, you can make an argument to slow down the pace or speed it up, depending on the effect you want. I find it’s useful here to share examples of what writing can look like if we speed it up or slow it down too much; both will have a detrimental effect on how we read the story. For example, if we tell the story of Perseus and the Gorgons too fast, it can look like this: Perseus set out on a quest to kill Medusa, a terrifying creature with snake hair and the power to turn anyone who looked at her into stone. With Fig. 1 56 | www.teachwire.net