SECOND LEVELTHIRD LEVEL

FOURTH LEVELLEARNING RESOURCES

Created by Scottish Book Trust

My Favourite Place in Scotland

Contents2 Introduction to My Favourite Place Learning resources3 My Favourite Place and CFE3 Lesson 1: Places and their significance to us4 Lesson 2 – Postcard/letter writing5 Lesson 3 – Favourite Place in the school/community6 Lesson 4 – researching a Place8 How to share your pupils’ work via Scottish Book Trust9 If you want to go a bit further...11 Appendix 1 – Pairs of images12 Appendix 2 – Others’ favourite places13 Appendix 3 – Bringing a place to life worksheet (Level 2)14 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 wouldlike 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, andso pupils are free to include places which are not well-known. Indeed, ifthey wish to describe a place in their own home or similarly personalspaces, they should feel absolutely free to do so.

Pupils can submit three main types of response:

l A piece of prosel A poeml A postcard/letter

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

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

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My Favourite Place and CFE

These resources are designed to help you:

l Plan lessons which effectively address Literacy outcomes. Talkingand Listening skills are extensively covered in various interview anddiscussions tasks. Reading skills are also incorporated throughresearch tasks. Finally, writing outcomes are prevalent in most tasks.

l Make effective use of ICT. The lesson ideas have been designed tomake minimal use of ICT for those unable to access technology, butlots of extension ideas are provided which suggest creative andengaging use of ICT, particularly in the ‘If You Want to Go a Bit Further’section.

l Engage different learning styles. A variety of responses to tasks aresuggested, including comic strips, slide shows, verbal responses anddigital storytelling.

l Plan effective whole-school and transition activities. The resourcesallow for lots of collaboration between different groups of pupils.

l Grab opportunities for outdoor learning! Many of the tasks will allowyou 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 meanthings to people.

Additional materials required: pairs of photos (Appendix 1)

ACTIVITIES FOR SECOND LEVEL

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

After this, ask pupils to pick one of the places depicted. Ask them toimagine what kind of person might like to go there. Get them to draw apicture of the person in that place, and then they can label their picturewith 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 repeatthe exercise using their own photographs.

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ACTIVITIES FOR THIRD AND FOURTH LEVEL

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

For instance, in Pair 1, the park bench might appeal to someone because itis a place they can be alone, whereas the shopping centre might appeal tosomeone 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 repeatthe exercise using their own photographs. To extend this activity further,you may wish to ask pupils to bring in photographs of their favouriteplaces on their phones and share them with the class along with a fewadjectives or quick descriptions. The class could then try to guess whichplace was nominated by whom!

Lesson 2 – Postcard/letter writing

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

Click on the following link to bring up an image of the Forth Rail Bridge onyour board: www.flickr.com/photos/kyz/3055812477/sizes/l/in/photostream

(There is an image of the Forth Road Bridge here if you prefer:www.flickr.com/photos/40299618@N00/3187947922/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

ACTIVITIES FOR SECOND/THIRD LEVEL

Ask pupils to imagine that they are standing at the scene of one of thephotographs. 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 throughtheir 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 theyhave made to create a short, descriptive postcard or letter.

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

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

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setting effectively: www.scottishbooktrust.com/learning/teaching-resources/lower-secondary/creative-writing-resources

ACTIVITIES FOR FOURTH LEVEL

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

Ask pupils to study a pair of images of less visually arresting places. Askthem to imagine that they are a character, and ask them to mindmap all thereasons why this place might be the character’s favourite place because ofmemories 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 towrite a comic strip where the character’s descriptions accompany imagesof the location.

EXTENSION

If you want to put a real focus on descriptive skills, you could ask somemembers of the class to write a descriptive passage in traditional prose,and then ask others in the class to adapt their classmates’ written workinto a comic strip, slide show or other suitable format. A guide to adaptingtexts into comic strip format is available on the Scottish Book Trustwebsite at the following link:www.scottishbooktrust.com/learning/cpd/toolkits/graphic-novels

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

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

Additional materials required:

l People describing favourite places (appendix 2)l Bringing a place to life worksheet (appendices 3 and 4)

ACTIVITIES FOR SECOND LEVEL

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

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

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ACTIVITIES FOR THIRD AND FOURTH LEVEL

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

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

HOMEWORK TASK

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

WHOLE SCHOOL/TRANSITION ACTIVITIES

You can choose to extend this activity by getting older pupils to dopresentations about their favourite places in the school or community to S1pupils. This can even be used as a transition activity, with S1 pupils goingout to P7 classes to present. If you want to use a class blog to share workbetween pupils, have a look at the ‘If You Want to Go a Bit Further’ sectionfor some help with running blogs. S1 pupils could also devise a lesson planfor P7 to share the process they went through for writing their pieces. Theycould host a return visit and then P7 could write their own pieces about thesecondary school.

Lesson 4 – Researching a place

ACTIVITIES FOR THIRD AND FOURTH LEVEL

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

l www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk – pupils can search for their town tosee if it has a feature page

l www.s1community.com – sites designed specifically for people to findout about Scotland’s small communities, go to ‘Memories’ section foran area’s history

l http://ssa.nls.uk – the National Library of Scotland’s Scottish ScreenArchive, where pupils can search for films about their town

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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 abouttheir local area. The following research goals can be used to focus thework:

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

You can use Wallwisher to bring together all the images, videos and textwhich pupils find about their chosen area. Wallwisher is easy to use andfree, and you can find a tutorial here:www.scottishbooktrust.com/learning/cpd/toolkits/online-tools/wallwisher

Alternatively, you can create a wall display, using a large map of the localarea. Pupils can label different parts of the map with things they havefound 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 linksto unlicensed music which can be used in presentations: http://reading-active-and-engaging.wikispaces.com/Creative+Commons+%28CC%29

WHOLE SCHOOL/TRANSITION ACTIVITIES

You can choose to extend this activity by getting older pupils to dopresentations about their favourite places in the school or community to S1pupils. This can even be used as a transition activity, with S1 pupils goingout to P7 classes to present. If you want to use a class blog to share workbetween pupils, have a look at the ‘If You Want to Go a Bit Further’ sectionfor some help with running blogs.

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

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

Audacity can be found here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net

There is an excellent get-started guide here:http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Audacity_for_Teachers_-_Installation_and_Basic_Editing

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How to share your pupils’ work via Scottish Book Trust

GLOW

The Scottish Book Trust For Schools GLOW group can be accessedthrough this link:https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/nationalsite/Working%20Together/Scottish%20Book%20Trust/default.aspx

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

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

l If a pupil has written a piece of prose, go to the Prose section andclick Add New Document.

l If a pupil has written a poem, go to the Poems section and click AddNew Document.

l If a pupil has written a postcard or letter, go to the Postcards andLetters section and click Add New Document.

l If a pupil has come up with another kind of text, go to the OtherResponses to My Favourite Place section and click Add NewDocument.

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

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

EMAIL

If you are unable to submit pupil responses through GLOW, you can emailthem to Chris Leslie, Scottish Book Trust’s Learning Resource Developer,at chris.leslie@scottishbooktrust.com. We will then upload the responsesto GLOW on your behalf.

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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 tocompile their findings and display them in the school.

One way to do this would be to create a display using a large map ofScotland. This website is a good starting point if you want to create a wall-sized map of Scotland:www.yourchildlearns.com/megamaps/print-europe-maps.html

You can find a blank map of Scotland here:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Scottish_Parliamentary_regions_2011.svg

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

CREATE A DIGITAL INTERACTIVE MAP

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

This tutorial on the Scottish Book Trust website tells you everything youneed to know to get registered and started with Prezi:www.scottishbooktrust.com/learning/cpd/toolkits/online-tools/prezi

There are several steps in creating a digital interactive map:

l First, you will need to find an image of a blank map of Scotland. Thereis a good one available here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scotland_map_blank.png

l After you have put this image into your Prezi, you will need to allowyour pupils to edit the Prezi. This is a simple process and a tutorial isavailable here: http://prezi.com/meeting/

l Pupils can now zoom in to the map of Scotland and put in their ownimages, text and videos relating to the place they have found outabout.

VISIT SOMEONE’S FAVOURITE PLACE

If it turns out that either you or your pupils can identify a favourite placewhich is reasonably close by, you may wish to visit the place. Dependingon the type of location, you can ask local people or staff if they can beinterviewed 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

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kept at the location for other people to see. For instance, the pieces ofwriting that they do could be laminated and displayed in local cafes, visitorcentres, 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 researchfindings. These GLOW instructional videos tell you all you need to knowabout setting up GLOW blogs:http://cookbooks.glowscotland.org.uk/blog/2010/10/29/lego-activities-at-slf-part-3-using-glow-blogs/

There is also an excellent tutorial video on YouTube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQnWj5VKeE

WAYPOINTING/GEOCACHING

Waypointing provides a great opportunity for learning in an outdoorenvironment. There is a comprehensive tutorial video on how to usewaypointing here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cy7DP0lA-M

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

l You can include written tasks with the caches when you hide them.When the pupils find the cache they can carry out the task.

l Depending on the location, you can make the tasks specific tobuildings or objects. If you hide caches around the school grounds, forexample, the tasks can relate to the location they are hidden in. Youcould ask pupils to think of five adjectives to describe a particularlocation, or list things they experience with the five senses.

l Waypointing can be used as a variation for the tasks in Lesson 3 inparticular.

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Appendix 1 – Pairs of images

Pair 1

Park bench Shopping centre

Pair 2

Bmx Track Bookshop

Pair 3

Playing sports at an all weather park Watching sports at a stadium

Pair 4

Sunny beach Freezing Cairngorms!

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Appendix 2 - Others’ favourite places

CHILDREN’S FAVOURITE PLACES

My favourite place is on the Leckie Estate at a little burn because all I canhear is the burn trickling and the birds tweeting. I can breathe in thecountry air. I always feel relaxed there and I really like it.– Pupil aged 9

My favourite place is up the tree in my front garden because I can see thewhole neighbourhood. I feel safe up the tree and if I'm playing tig no-onecan catch me. Sometimes cherries grow that are safe to eat. It is quite hardto climb up the tree.– Pupil aged 10

My favourite place is my back garden. I like it because I like to play footballwith my dad and brother.– Pupil aged 8

ADULTS’ FAVOURITE PLACES

I love Woodchester Mansion in the Cotswolds. You should go in Novemberat dusk; it's really spooky and full of stories. There's a wonderful taleassociated with it about a beautiful young woman in medieval times whowas supposed to be getting married to a horrible man. But she ended upriding off with the man she adored while the bridegroom was eaten bywolves. It's haunted beyond belief. – Jilly Cooper, Writer

I have always loved old buildings for the feeling of history that seems tohave seeped into the very walls and the memory of all the people whohave walked the halls. The first time I visited Glasgow University’s mainbuilding, the word “gothic” had me imagining all kinds of ghosts driftingaround the place, labouring under loads of heavy books instead ofclanking chains, as they hurried to classes that had long since ended. – Cassandra Connolly-Brown, Scottish Book Trust

Best of all I love knowing this place so well that I can slip into its moodsand seasons like a slipper. I know where the ice will trip me in winter andwhere the wild garlic will send out its pungent whiff of early summer. Iknow where the primroses hide and where tiny raspberries will flaunt theirsweetness behind an armour of nettles. I know the smell, the lovely smell,of the rain-sodden earth. – Sally Magnusson (BBC broadcaster and writer) describes her favouritewalk in farming countryside in the north of Glasgow

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Appendix 3 – Bringing a place to life

WORKSHEET FOR LEVEL 2

What is your favourite place in the school?

What can you see and hear when you are there?

What kind of things do you do there?

What kind of things do you think about there, and how do you feel?

What is the best thing about the place?

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Appendix 4 – Bringing a place to life

WORKSHEET FOR LEVEL 3 AND 4

What is your favourite place in the school?

What kind of things can you see, hear, etc?

How does the place make you feel? What kind of things do you think aboutwhen you are there?

How else would you describe the place? Is it busy or quiet? Light or dark?

What do you do when you are at the place? Are there any memories thatstand out about it?

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