My Favourite Place in Scotlandlearning Resources

My Favourite Place in ScotlandLearning Resources

Created by Scottish Book Trust

Contents

3Introduction to My Favourite Place Learning resources

4My Favourite Place and CFE

5Lesson 1: Places and their significance to us

7Lesson 2 – Postcard/letter writing

9Lesson 3 – Favourite Place in the school/community

10Lesson 4 – researching a Place

13How to share your pupils’ work via Scottish Book Trust

15If you want to go a bit further...

18Appendix 1 – pairs of images

20Appendix 2 – others’ favourite places

21Appendix 3 – bringing a place to life worksheet (Level 2)

22 Appendix 4 – bringing a place to life worksheet (Level 3 and 4)

Introduction - My Favourite Place in Scotland

These guidelines are aimed at school teachers and librarians who would like to use the My Favourite Place in Scotland project in their school.

We are looking for pupils to share their experiences of their favourite place. People are attracted to all different kinds of spaces and environments, and so pupils are free to include places which are not well-known. Indeed, if they wish to describe a place in their own home or similarly personal spaces, they should feel absolutely free to do so.

Pupils can submit three main types of response:

A piece of prose
A poem
A postcard/letter

However, wider texts are also suitable as responses: if pupils wish to submit a podcast, slideshow or any other form of response, this is to be encouraged!

Scottish Book Trust will feature a selection of the responses on our main website, and we will also be looking for teachers and pupils to submit their work to our GLOW page for others to see. Instructions for doing this can be found in the ‘How to Share your Pupils’ Work via Scottish Book Trust’ section.

My Favourite Place and CFE

These resources are designed to help you:

Plan lessons which effectively address Literacy outcomes. Talking and Listening skills are extensively covered in various interview and discussions tasks. Reading skills are also incorporated through research tasks. Finally, writing outcomes are prevalent in most tasks.
Make effective use of ICT. The lesson ideas have been designed to make minimal use of ICT for those unable to access technology, but lots of extension ideas are provided which suggest creative and engaging use of ICT, particularly in the ‘If You Want to Go a Bit Further’ section.
Engage different learning styles. A variety of responses to tasks are suggested, including comic strips, slide shows, verbal responses and digital storytelling.
Plan effective whole-school and transition activities. The resources allow for lots of collaboration between different groups of pupils.
Grab opportunities for outdoor learning! Many of the tasks will allow you to take pupils out and about with a digital camera and a notebook!

Lesson 1 - Places and their significance to us

Objective: to understand the different ways in which places can mean things to people.

Additional materials required: pairs of photos (Appendix 1)

Activities for Second Level(Eng 2-27a)

Show your pupils a pair of photographs from Appendix 1 on the board. Ask them to work in pairs. First of all, get each pair to study the first photo and come up with a list of as many adjectives as possible describing the place in the photo. Then, repeat this exercise with the second photo.

After this, ask pupils to pick one of the places depicted. Ask them to imagine what kind of person might like to go there. Get them to draw a picture of the person in that place, and then they can label their picture with the person’s thoughts and feelings while they are in this place.

As a homework activity, you could ask pupils to bring in their own pictures (either photographs, printouts or cutouts from magazines, etc) and repeat the exercise using their own photographs.

Activities for Third and Fourth Level(Eng 3-27a)

Divide your pupils into groups and give each group one of the pairs of images. The pairs have been organised so that each of the places depicted are quite distinct in terms of character, atmosphere, etc. Ask each group to study their two images, and then mind map the different reasons why each place might hold appeal for someone.

For instance, in Pair 1, the park bench might appeal to someone because it is a place they can be alone, whereas the shopping centre might appeal to someone of a different temperament who enjoys bustle and activity.

As a homework activity, you could ask pupils to bring in their own pictures (either photographs, printouts or cutouts from magazines, etc) and repeat the exercise using their own photographs. To extend this activity further, you may wish to ask pupils to bring in photographs of their favourite places on their phones and share them with the class along with a few adjectives or quick descriptions. The class could then try to guess which place was nominated by whom!

Lesson 2 - Postcard/letter writing

Objective: To equip pupils with the skills needed to describe different kinds of places.

Click on the following link to bring up an image of the Forth Rail Bridge on your board:

(There is an image of the Forth Road Bridge here if you prefer:

Activities for Second/Third Level(Eng 2-27a)

Ask pupils to imagine that they are standing at the scene of one of the photographs. Ask them to write five headings in their jotters: See, Hear, Touch, Taste, Smell

Now, ask them to list all the different things they are experiencing through their senses as they stand at the scene.

After this, ask pupils to imagine they are writing a postcard to a friend, trying to describe what the scene is like. They should use the notes they have made to create a short, descriptive postcard or letter.

You can vary this activity by splitting pupils into groups and giving each group only one sense rather than all five.

There are also videos available on our website to help pupils describe setting effectively:

Activities for Fourth Level(Eng 4-27a)

Places do not have to be scenic or striking for them to assume significance for us.

Ask pupils to study a pair of images of less visually arresting places. Ask them to imagine that they are a character, and ask them to mindmap all the reasons why this place might be the character’s favourite place because of memories or emotions it stirs up.

Then, get the pupils to work on a descriptive passage about the place, through the eyes of their chosen character. You can choose to get them to write a comic strip where the character’s descriptions accompany images of the location.

Extension(Lit 4-24a)

If you want to put a real focus on descriptive skills, you could ask some members of the class to write a descriptive passage in traditional prose, and then ask others in the class to adapt their classmates’ written work into a comic strip, slide show or other suitable format. A guide to adapting texts into comic strip format is available on the Scottish Book Trust website at the following link:

Lesson 3 - Favourite Places in the school/in our community

Lesson objective: to identify all the things about a place that make it appeal to us.

Additional materials required:

People describing favourite places (appendix 2)

Bringing a place to life worksheet (appendices 3 and 4)

Activities for Second Level(Eng 2-30a)

Show your pupils the selection of quotes from people describing their favourite places.

Ask your pupils at the beginning of the lesson to think about their favourite place in the school building. Then, they can fill in the worksheet with all the aspects of the place which give it significance.

Activities for Third and Fourth Level(Eng 3-30a, Eng 4-30a)

Show your pupils the selection of quotes from people describing their favourite places.

Homework Task(Lit 2-05a, Lit 3-05a, Lit 4-05a)

Ask pupils to go home and interview a parent or family member about their favourite place. Get them to prepare a list of questions which they feel are important to ask. For instance, what are the surroundings like? What do they do there? Are there other people there with them? Why do they like it so much?

Whole school/transition activities

You can choose to extend this activity by getting older pupils to do presentations about their favourite places in the school or community to S1 pupils. This can even be used as a transition activity, with S1 pupils going out to P7 classes to present. If you want to use a class blog to share work between pupils, have a look at the ‘If You Want to Go a Bit Further’ section for some help with running blogs.

Lesson 4 - Researching a place

Activities for Third and Fourth Level (Lit 3-14a, Lit 4-14a, Lit 3-25a, Lit 3-26a, Lit 3-26a, Lit 4-26a)

If they are choosing to write about a public place in their final piece, pupils should find out a little bit about it by researching it on the internet. Here are some good places to start:

(pupils can search for their town to see if it has a feature page).
designed specifically for people to find out about Scotland’s small communities – go to ‘Memories’ section for an area’s history
- the National Library of Scotland’s Scottish Screen Archive, where pupils can search for films about their town

Split the pupils into groups, and give each group a local area to research. Ask pupils to collect as many images, videos and text as they can about their local area.The following research goals can be used to focus the work:

Most interesting fact
One famous/interesting person associated with the place
One number-based fact about the place
Best photograph

You can use Wallwisher to bring together all the images, videos and text which pupils find about their chosen area. Wallwisher is easy to use and free, and you can find a tutorial here:

Alternatively, you can create a wall display, using a large map of the local area. Pupils can label different parts of the map with things they have found out.

As an alternative, you could get pupils to create a slideshow of images, picking appropriate music to accompany it. This website gives lots of links to unlicensed music which can be used in presentations:

Whole school/transition activities

Pupils can also interview each other about their favourite places. This can be done in class, or pupils from your class can go to other classes and do interviews there. Don’t feel you have to restrict interviewees to just the pupils – it might be a good idea for pupils to go round and interview teachers about their favourite places too!

If you want to record interviews, Audacity is an easy place to start – the programme is portable and can be held on a USB stick. All you need is a microphone!

Audacity can be found here:

There is an excellent get-started guide here:

How to share your pupils’ workvia Scottish Book Trust

GLOW

The Scottish Book Trust For Schools GLOW group can be accessed through this link:

Alternatively, in GLOW, type ‘Scottish Book Trust for Schools’ into the search bar at the top right. The Scottish Book Trust for Schools GLOW group will appear in the search results, either in the main column or in the Published GLOW groups section at the top right.

Once you are in the GLOW group, click on the tab which says My Favourite Place. After this, depending on the type of response your pupils have written, do one of the things below:

If a pupil has written a piece of prose, go to the Prose section and click Add New Document.
If a pupil has written a poem, go to the Poems section and click Add New Document.
If a pupil has written a postcard or letter, go to the Postcards and Letters section and click Add New Document.
If a pupil has come up with another kind of text, go to the Other Responses to My Favourite Place section and click Add New Document.

After this, click Choose File, browse through your computer to find the file you want to upload, and click on Save and Close.

When you return to the My Favourite Place page, you should now see the document you have just uploaded.

If you are unable to submit pupil responses through GLOW, you can email them to Chris Leslie, Scottish Book Trust’s Learning Resource Developer, at . We will then upload the responses to GLOW on your behalf.

If you want to go a bit further...

Creating a display map of Scotland

If your pupils have researched various places in Scotland, you may wish to compile their findings and display them in the school.

One way to do this would be to create a display using a large map of Scotland. This website is a good starting point if you want to create a wall-sized map of Scotland:

You can find a blank map of Scotland here:

After the map is up on the wall, you can populate it with pupils’ work about the places they have researched. If they have chosen to produce informative leaflets, for example, you can pin these to the map in the appropriate place.

Create a digital interactive map

You can use the online interactive presentation tool Prezi to create an interactive map of Scotland.

This tutorial on the Scottish Book Trust website tells you everything you need to know to get registered and started with Prezi:

There are several steps in creating a digital interactive map:

First, you will need to find an image of a blank map of Scotland. There is a good one available here:
After you have put this image into your Prezi, you will need to allow your pupils to edit the Prezi. This is a simple process and a tutorial is available here:
Pupils can now zoom in to the map of Scotland and put in their own images, text and videos relating to the place they have found out about.

Visit someone’s favourite place

If it turns out that either you or your pupils can identify a favourite place which is reasonable close by, you may wish to visit the place. Depending on the type of location, you can ask local people or staff if they can be interviewed by pupils about the place and what it means to them.

You may also like to ask your pupils to produce a resource which can be kept at the location for other people to see. For instance, the pieces of writing that they do could be laminated and displayed in local cafes, visitor centres, etc.

Cross-class blogging

If you would like other classes to read and interact with your class’s work, it is easy to set up a class blog to showcase photographs and research findings. These GLOW instructional videos tell you all you need to know about setting up GLOW blogs:

There is also an excellent tutorial video on YouTube:

Waypointing/Geocaching

Waypointing provides a great opportunity for learning in an outdoor environment. There is a comprehensive tutorial video on how to use waypointing here:

There are many ways this technology can be applied in the classroom:

You can include written tasks with the caches when you hide them. When the pupils find the cache they can carry out the task.
Depending on the location, you can make the tasks specific to buildings or objects. If you hide caches around the school grounds, for example, the tasks can relate to the location they are hidden in. You could ask pupils to think of five adjectives to describe a particular location, or list things they experience with the five senses.
Waypointing can be used as a variation for the tasks in Lesson 3 in particular.

Appendix 1 – Pairs of images

Pair 1

Park benchShopping centre

Pair 2

Bmx TrackBookshop

Pair 3