To write a biography (Part 1)

Key Stage 2

English

Important Scientists - Biographical writing

﻿Hi, everyone it's me Ms Chu. Today's lesson is very exciting because we get to start to write our biographies today. We are going to use our plan from the previous lesson to help us to write the introduction and the first two paragraphs or the first two parts of our biography. That is early life and his school life. Am very excited about this because we get to put everything that we know into practise now. So when you're ready we can begin. What will you need for today's lesson? It comes as no surprise that you will need some paper or a book, pencil or pen, and you need to be super focused for this lesson. What's the agenda. We are going to start with a warm up, warm ourselves up for writing. Then we're going to recap on our plans. Then I'm going to be showing you some shared writing. And then in between the shared writing, you're going to be doing your own writing, your independent task writing. What's the warmup? Hmm. Which of these sentences make sense and why? As a young boy, Charles did not like school preferring to be outside exploring and collecting. Charles, who did not like school as a young boy, preferred being outside exploring and collecting. Pause the video and tell me, which is a better sentence and why. The second sentence. Yes. It's a complex sentence with a relative clause. Charles, who did not like school as a young boy, our relative clause, preferred being outside exploring and collecting is the more technical sentence. And it's the one that's grammatically correct and makes sense. Perfect. Now let's recap on some planning. Planning. We need all of these things. This is what our biography would look like. We would have a title, "The life of Charles Darwin." You might want to put. An introduction introducing everyone to who he is. Subheadings, the main body of the biography under the subheading. So written in paragraphs, and then your conclusion at the end. This is what you will have. Your title, your introduction, early life, school life, voyages and discoveries and finally the conclusion. really important. Let's look at our success criteria. What do we need to be successful in our writing today? I have used a range of adverbial sentence starters. Adverbial sentence starters. What are adverbial... So adverbial could be time conjunctions that's telling us when something happened. It could be words that end in L-Y. So adverbs, adverbs and then L-Y. So telling us how something has happened. Interestingly, we might give a time connection. I have written a complex sentence with a relative clause. Relative clause. Brilliant. We know how to do that don't we? We've done lots of practise using our who pronoun. I've used a range of formal and or but conjunctions, Formal conjunctions. Remember our and formal conjunctions are things like moreover, furthermore, in addition to, as well as. And our but, but conjunctions are, however, on the other hand, instead of. Let's now look at some shared writing of the introduction. These are the notes that we retrieved from a nonfiction text. We're going to use these notes to help us along with the success criteria together. We're going to use those to help us to write our introduction. You're also going to use our plans. Well we have our introductory sentence, our bullet points, and then our linking sentence. So we're going to use everything that we've got from our previous lessons to support us with our writing. I want you to pause the video, go and get all of your notes, your plan and your paper ready to watch me do a shared right? Excellent, so let's look at our plan and the success criteria together to write our introduction. So on our plan we have a Charles Darwin who was an English naturalist, became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. Let's put that straight in. We've got our opening line right there. And also that is a relative clause, so perfect. We can tick that off on our success criteria. Perfect. Now we have to think about how we can include the other bullet points. We could refer to We could say Charles Darwin again, or we could refer to him as in a different way. We could say this intelligent man scientist. And then we go straight to our bullet point, possessed a unique hunger hunger for knowledge about the natural world. And if we look at the next bullet point, he came up with a scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. We could just put that straight in, or we could say it was because of his curiosity, that he came up with a scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. And then we can tick off our second bullet point. Third bullet points says, his book, "the origin of species 1859 " has deeply influenced modern society and thought. Let's pop that straight in as well. All of these bullet points are helping us to write His book. famous I want to put in famous actually. His famous book well known famous book "The origin "of species" when was it written? 1859 has deeply influenced modern society and thought full stop. Let's read over it. Check that it makes sense. Charles Darwin, who was an English naturalist became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. The intelligent man possessed a unique hunger for knowledge about the natural world. It was because of his curiosity that he came up with the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. His famous book "The origin of species" 1859 has deeply influenced modern society and thought. Great so we can actually tick off all the things we've got on our plan. And then if we look at our success criteria, we have got a relative clause here who was an English naturalist. Oh, we need our coma there. who was an English naturalist, became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. And then have we got anything else that we can tick off at the moment? Not yet. But that's okay because the success criteria is to support us to write the whole biography. So it's okay if we haven't got all of it yet because we've only just written the introduction. Now we want to link the introduction onto the next paragraph. So a really good way to hook the reader in a bit more would be to use a sentence like read on to find out more about this scientist. Or we could say about this incredible scientist. And that is our linking sentence. Remember at the end of each main section or category or heading subheading, we want to use a linking sentence. Great. Excellent, now it's your turn to write the introduction. You need your success criteria here it is. And I said you need your plan next to you and your notes from before from the lesson where we retrieved information. Good luck off you go and write your introduction. Now we are on to the early life section of the biography. Here are the notes that we retrieve from a nonfiction text. We're going to use that to help us. There are two sections of his early life that we need to write about. Two different paragraphs. We are also going to be using our plan of the early life section, with the introductory sentence, our sentence starters and facts and our linking sentence, because we need that right at the end. Pause the video and go and get those things ready. Great. And now the next paragraph about his early life. Let's look at the plan. Father, Robert Darwin, doctor. Mother Sukey Wedgwood, inherited pottery business. Huge house the mount Shrewsbury. Favourite hobby, collecting things, shells, seals, coins and minerals. And the success criteria is there, I need to use that too. So let's start with his parents. Charles Charles Charles's parents were we could just say who they were straight away or we could lead with were incredibly rich. His father let's look at what his father, Robert Darwin, what was his job we could put that in. Was a doctor and his mother Sukey Wedgwood inherited, the family pottery business. His father was a Ooh, let's put in successful. Let's add to that successful doctor and his mother Sukey Wedgwood inherited the family pottery business. So what did that mean then if they were rich? So consequently we could use one of our sentence starters con or our formal conjunctions, consequently all six Darwin children. He had five all six Darwin children lived comfortably, comfortably in a huge house in Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury. And then we could maybe give the name of the house, called the Mount. And we could use brackets because we're giving extra information here. Brilliant. And now the last bullet point that we just need to add to this. Favourite hobby collecting things we could say as a young boy, because this is his early life. So it makes sense to you that. as a young boy, his favourite hobby was collecting things such as Shells seals coins and minerals. Perfect. Following on from the last sentence that we wrote, which was about his favourite hobby, we want to stick to the same subheading of early life, but we now want to refer to a different part of his early life. So if we look at the notes, the first bullet point sort of highlights this rather tragic time in his life. So we want to start with something like sadly, Charles's Charles's mother died when he was only eight years old. His sisters, they ended up teaching him at home. Does he enjoy it? No. So the third bullet point suggest but he was completely miserable. And the reason for this is the fourth bullet point. We could say Charles or we could say the young naturalist always wanted to what? be outside exploring and collecting as this was his. We don't want to take hobby again, we can say passion, not repeating ourselves. Then the next bullet point moves on to talking about his older or his elder brother. So let's talk about Charles's, Charles's elder brother Ras, and then we could give short for Erasmus named after his grandfather was lively and mischievous. mischievous. And he always encouraged didn't he, he encouraged Charles to set up experiments, check our spelling of Erasmus experiments. Well, what did they do in there experiments where they burned chemicals and grew crystals check on spelling of burned edit. And then we need to have a linking sentence because this is our last paragraph before we move on to the next subheading, which is his school life. What would be a good linking sentence that we could use, which would lead really nicely into school life? We could say that he went to boarding school. So do we remember how old he was? He was about nine when the next, we could say shortly, shortly after he turned nine, he was sent to boarding school. That links really nicely onto the next paragraph. Let's just read over and check that it makes sense and we haven't got any punctuation errors or spelling errors. Sadly, Charles's mother died when he was only eight years old. His sisters ended up teaching him at home, but he was completely miserable. The young naturalist always wanted to be outside exploring and collecting as this was his passion. Charles's elder brother, Ras short for Erasmus, was lively and mischievous and encouraged Charles to set up experiments where they burned chemicals and grew crystals. Shortly after he turned nine, he was sent to boarding school. Let me just have a quick check of my plan. Have I got everything there, yep. And my success criteria. I've already ticked off my relative clause and I ticked off a formal conjunction. I used consequently in my last paragraph. And what else could I take? I could, I could, which is not on there. Give myself a pat on the back for referring to Charles in a different way. Instead of using his name I have said the young naturalist. Also I've used brackets, I've used a compound sentence with a but coordinating conjunction. Great. I'm happy with that I can move on now. Brilliant. Now it is your turn to write the early life section of your biography. I would like you to write the first paragraph first of that section and then the second one after it. Two different paragraphs. Use the success criteria and definitely have your plans with you too. Good luck and enjoy. Now we are on to the the shared writing school life section. Here are the notes that we retrieved from a nonfiction text. Do you remember them? Make sure you have a look at yours. This is the second part of the subheading school life. You also need to have your plans where you have your introductory sentence, your three main facts with the sentence starters, and then your linking sentence from school life linking onto the next subheading which is the voyages. Pause the video and go and get all your things ready. Then press play when you are ready to watch the shared right. Great we are now onto the school life paragraph. We've got our subheading written we've got our plan. We've got all success criteria. Brilliant. Let's look at our first bullet point, which needs to lead on from the last sentence, which was that he got sent to boarding schools. So in 1818 Charles we've already said that he was sent to boarding school. So we'll not repeat that. We could maybe talk about how he found it boring. So Charles found boarding school, which we could give extra information, which was just down the road in Shrewsbury, incredibly boring. What did he find particularly boring? Let's have a look. Latin and ancient Greek. He was not enamoured. He was not enamoured. Didn't like, didn't love, by the lessons. Let's list them Latin and ancient Greek, or we could say once again, once again, because he wasn't enamoured at school either. Was he? now he's at boarding school. Once again he was not enamoured by the lessons. Let's look at the next, the third bullet point. University. So we need to think about how he didn't go. So without without gaining top marks, going to university was out of the question. So he left next bullet point school at 16 didn't he. Hey, his father wanted him to be a doctor like him spent the summer following him around. Why did his father want him to? I think his father was worried about him. So because they worried about his son's future. Robert Darwin thought it would be best for Charles, to become a doctor like him let's check our spelling of best. That's okay. Let's read through in 1818, Charles found boarding school, which was just down the road in Shrewsbury. We've used a relative clause there another relative clause. So we've now can tick that off again. Incredibly boring. Once again, he was not enamoured by the lessons and we've used a colon to introduce what the lessons are to explain Latin and ancient Greek without gaining top marks, going to university was out of the question. So he left school at 16 years old. Worried about his son's future, Robert Darwin thought it would be best. It would be best for Charles to become a doctor like him. Let's follow on. Let's continue on from the last paragraph. We're now going to start a different paragraph under the same subheading of school life, because we're still in that part of Charles Darwin's life. But now we are moving on to the part where he's at university. let's look at the plan, started training to be doctor, hated it abandoned two years later, then studied at Cambridge uni to be a clergyman. Focused on bug collecting. Okay. So following on so soon after, because it was soon after he had followed his dad around Charles started training to be, a doctor at Edinburgh university. Uni ver sity again, he hated it, but, and but again, he hated it. After two years studying of studies, we could say he abandoned What were you studying? He was studying medicine? Wasn't he. in studying he abandoned medicine? And went on to study to be went on to study to be a clergyman. Clergyman. At, where was he this time Cambridge this time he loved it. So we could just say he loved it. A short, simple sentence for a fact. During his time there, during his time, the time that he was there, he began bug collecting. He focuses time. He was a, he was able to turn his attention to bug collecting. And remember, we know that that's his favourite hobby. He loves collecting things. which was one on his favourite hobbies. And then we could say, we could link it now to the next paragraph, which is about his voyages around the world. Or mainly specifically to South America. Let's use our linking sentence. It was Charles's love of collecting bugs and studying natural world, because we know that he loves the natural world. He loves being outside, that led him to an oppo rtunity of a lifetime. And that links really really nicely onto the next paragraph or the next subheading, which is voyages. Let's just check now if we've got everything we need from our plan. I decided to leave at the last part. I didn't think that was as important, but you are more than welcome to put that into your writing. Let's look at the success criteria. I've got some time, I've used some adverbial starters. I've got some time conjunctions soon after, after two years of studies, during this time, Brilliant. We can tick that off. And I have got my short sentence for effect. He loved it. And the views and exclamation mark at the end to suggest that something exciting is about to happen. Excellent. I hope you watched carefully on how to write those two paragraphs because now it is your turn to write them, use the success criteria and have your plans enjoy. Good luck. Well done. Nearly at the end now worked really hard today really want you to now read back your writing, read your introduction, your early life and your school life. And I want you to make sure that it makes sense. Make sure you've got the purpose right? Check for punctuation. Check you've used precise vocab. Check and change any spelling errors you might have, get a sense of what the reader will feel. Is it using a formal tone and lastly make sure you enjoy your writing. Pause the video and go ahead and do that now. Well done. You've worked so hard in this lesson. You've done some really excellent writing using your plans. Then you looked at some shared writing and you did your own. Super super well done to you. We are so nearly there. We are one lesson away from finishing our biographies. Well done you've completed this lesson. You've worked really hard and I look forward to teaching your next one.

To write a biography (Part 1)

To write a biography (Part 1)

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UnitEnglish / Important Scientists - Biographical writing

English