CREATIVE WRITING - Under the Sea (Student Age 9-11)

Climate Change / Reduce Plastics Topic.
The children are developing their understanding of what is happening to our oceans; many children have not experienced or ever been in the ocean to observe what it should look like. Therefore, as a pre-session activity, we undertook a small group discussion about oceans and what they look like. The key questions to discuss were: Have you ever been in a ocean before? Where was it ? What was it like when you looked down at the bottom of the sea? What kind of things could you see – describe them? What would you expect to see?

Arlene Beattie
Primary School Teacher

PRACTICAL SESSION

Once we had discussed and reviewed the key questions, we undertook a group task to build a bank of descriptive phrases associated with what the ocean may look like, using 2D images to help generate ideas. After completing their mind map of descriptive phrases, the children experienced the ClassVR headsets in pairs. We focused on the Underwater playlist, taking a deeper look at the Fish and Coral, Underwater Caribbean and Clownfish New Caledonia tracks. The pupils with the headsets on used their pre-knowledge of descriptive phrases to describe to their partner what they were seeing. The partner’s role was to write these down on their mind map. After a period of time, the children swapped and continued until all the images and videos have been completed. By the end of the session, all the pupils built up a bank of descriptive phrases that they could then use in their own writing when creating a description of the ocean.

IMPACT ON LEARNING

The children have a far greater understanding of what the ocean looks like. They can experience first hand how the fish and plant life move in the water and they became familiar with the colours and noises that can be heard in a real-life ocean. Therefore, they were able to add all of this content into their written piece. The children were able to use their senses to write an in-depth setting description of an ocean. The follow-on lessons will look at: What is happening to our oceans with the impact of plastics? What impact will this have on the plan and animal life?