Actis Scenarios

Literacy activities

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Use the Smash script as a stimulus for the text level work as part of your literacy session. Link your current learning objective with an activity below.

Journalistic writing (writing composition): Four literacy sessions

Also includes work on active and passive verbs, opportunities for work on active and passive voice, alliteration and punctuation usage.

Session one Session two Session three Session four Further activity: Instructions Further activity: Rules Further activity: Letters

Session two

During the next literacy session discuss these headlines (or similar if more topical and relevant to the children):

Factory forced to close
Big Boss closes factory (or Fat Cat closes factory)
Boss forced to close factory
Failing Factory is Finally Closed

Ask children to tell you how the headlines are different. Using the terms active and passive verbs, subject and object, children should discuss the difference in meaning of the four headlines, although essentially the factory is closing.

The factory has no choice; it is being 'forced' and so is the subject of an action over which it has no control. Also, the person or thing doing the forcing, the object, is not named and so the reader has no one to blame when he/she reads the headline.
This time there is a simple object, active verb, subject sentence. Again the factory is blameless and this time the reader can identify the object or doer as the Big Boss (note alliteration). Also using Big Boss, or worse still Fat Cat (which implies a huge salary, lazy, smug type figure), creates a picture in the mind of the reader and so gives more blame to the boss.
This time it seems that the boss has no choice but to close the factory and so the reader does not give the same blame.
The verb is passive because the factory is the subject and again the object is not named (as in headline a). However, the effect on the reader is quite different. This time the factory is blamed for its own closure, the adjective 'failing' describes the factory in a negative way. Also note the use of alliteration in the sentence. (The children might wish to change closed to finished to complete the alliteration).

After initial discussion on use of headlines and how they relate to the corresponding article, ask children to write two different headlines to report the incident in Smash.

They should consider 'blame' and where it might lie.

Give children no more than 10 minutes to come up with two headlines. Encourage alliteration, puns, and use of active and passive voice to sway opinion.

When all the headlines are done, spend some time sorting them into different piles. Children should be looking specifically at the active and passive voice and how blame has been assigned.