The magic of Christmas! Watch, read and write .....

Here is a video clip that shares with its audience the magic of Christmas for a young child (it's based upon a visit to Lapland) and it's an opportunity for us to develop some reading and writing activities with our more advanced primary language learners or with KS3 Year 7 pupils.No words are spoken in any language,but the short clip tells the story of the magic of Christmas for this little child!
Let's make our own"Magic of Christmas " advertisements!

Here is the link to the video clip

In the clip we can see a little boy asleep, who wakes up, gets out of bed , goes to the window and sees the snow.He goes outside to play in the snow with his dad and then goes back inside.Father Christmas arrives , the little boy see him and receives a present!

So let's make our own video clip,using these reading and writing activities based on nouns and verbs. 

Step One 
Let's watch the clip and then arrange the key nouns in the target language from the video clip as a story ladder from beginning to end.Share each noun in the target language with the children (may be they need thinking time or bilingual dictionary time to understand the noun they can see).Ask the children to sort the nouns in to the correct order they saw them in the video clip , 
Key target language nouns to source : bedroom,bed,boy.window.snow.sledge,father, house,Father Christmas, present)

A drama and language activity opportunity
Create freeze frames of the key target language nouns or actions associated with the key target language nouns 






Step Two 
Give out the key phrases that describe the action.Ask the children to use their prior knowledge of daily routine phrases from their work on their own personal routine to locate and identify the key verbs and target language.Give each pair a set of key verbal phrase strips,so that the children can make a verbal phrase rolling script of the events as they watch the clip again (in the third person singular - or as less of a challenge in the first person singular) 
Key target language verbal phrases in third person singular: he is sleeping,he wakes up,he gets up, he walks to the window, he sees the snow, it's snowing, he plays with his father outside, he goes inside, Father Christmas arrives, he sees Father Christmas, he receives a present) 

A story board script
Collect in the verbal phrase strips and blu-tac a pack of them to the flip chart or white board.It's important that three phrases are missing from the pack of phrases.Ask the children to read what they can see and working with a partner can the children identify and remember which phrases are missing and  write them on individual white boards or rough paper. Take feedback and  then reveal the missing strips.



Changing the script
Now ask the children working in groups of four to write their own story board scripts.They are allowed to use four of the verbal phrases exactly as they are written in the activities above.They must change two of the items in the story on two other phrases and they must try to add two new verbal phrases of their own( e.g a change of weather or an additional piece of information about the weather and who the little boy is playing with outside in the snow).

The magic of Christmas !
Using the picture at the top of the page as the back drop or illustration they can now tell their own story about the Magic of christmas as a spoken or written text...........