51ºÚÁÏ

WORDS ON A STAGE, NOT WORDS ON A PAGE! Do you keep telling your class to write about Priestley’s characters as dramatic constructs? Do you tell them to start sentences with things like ‘Priestley presents Sheila as …’ to get high marks? This video and the cartooned handouts help learners to study how Priestley dramatises his themes. 9 mins 15 seconds long, the video is a fresh, fun way to approach what can be a tricky topic.
Vimeo and YouTube links are included in the worksheets iin case one version conks out.

I encourage my students to use colour-coded highlighters in the same colours as the character socks. This reduces the amount of annotation in their copies of the texts, while creating clear visual links between key theatrical concepts and the students’ notes on the characters. There is also more room in their texts for key abstract nouns such as ‘capitalism’ and for the vocabulary of feelings, to describe the audience’s response, e.g. ‘frustrated’, ‘exasperated’, ‘horrified’ and so on.

Also, sock puppets are a laugh, and the students will make their own discoveries with them!

The worksheets that accompany this can be used in sequence or as individual pages. The first sock image is coloured in pink like the Sheila sock in the video. After that all the little pictures can be coloured in as each student prefers.