The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas – an online EAL vocabulary lesson (Year 7).

Year 7 read John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas this year and some of my EAL lessons focused on the novel in order to provide language for understanding and expression of context, characters and themes. I taught most of these lessons online this year, so there are often questions and varied tasks for learners to consider and complete, in order to keep them engaged and involved. This lesson was about 1 hour long and was an online, live (synchronous) lesson.

The lesson

I always start with an activity to review the previous lesson’s key points or language and in this case it was context-related vocabulary for the novel through an online hangman game using words they’d had to study using our class Quizlet.

I then asked them to think of one character from the novel so far and write 2 adjectives in the chat which would describe that character. The other classmates had to try to guess who the chosen character was. Then I showed them the words on the slide, took some time to break up sounds and practise pronunciation, and asked them to sort them into groups of similar-meaning words which involved a short group discussion. Following agreement on groups, they then had to use these newer words to describe characters in the chat, as we had done at the start of the lesson (repeated task – better vocabulary second time round!)

(excuse the typos – our chat-writing is notoriously full of errors as we type furiously!)

After this short activity, we moved on to suggesting opposites of these words and carried out a quick task on Learning Apps to match our words with a selection of antonyms, before focusing our discussion on how we can use prefixes to make some words negative un -/ in- / im-/dis- and our knowledge of other words like this. With a bigger class and more time, you could send them off to find more examples in the novel, or beyond!

Some might dispute my choice of opposites, but this is a group of young learners (aged 11), so I went for more generalised opposites which would be most common in their schoolwork and left the subtleties for another time!

We applied these words immediately to our novel again, writing short sentences about characters in a shared document in our Team.

Finally, I collected the best examples and added them to the presentation, which was posted to the group and re-used frequently in later lessons when writing about characters.

In online lessons with younger learners variety in tasks and pace makes such a difference – sometimes we spoke about tasks, sometimes we used the chat, sometimes they were sent to activities on external sites, sometimes a shared document. All in all, short, snappy tasks which encouraged pupils to apply new vocabulary which they could take into their English lessons for immediate use, but also link to other subject content.