Video: To engage with the text

﻿Hello, everybody. My name's Ms. Chamberlain-Webber. And I'm going to be your teacher for all five lessons in this guided reading unit the "Demon Dentist." I'm particularly excited about this one because the author of this book is one of my favourites. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at the author and the characters and setting of the book by reading a little extract from it. During the lesson and throughout the unit, when we come across new vocabulary, I will say my turn and say the vocabulary and then your turn. And that means you should repeat those words back to me. Let's try with my name, Ms. Chamberlain-Weber. Your turn. Very good. Sometimes I will just use this action and that will mean to say it back to me. Great. Let's get started with the first lesson of "Demon Dentist." So the structure of the lesson is going to start with introducing the author of the book. Next, we're going to read some of the tasks and look at some key vocabulary. Finally, we're going to summarise at the end of the lesson. In this lesson, you will need paper and a pencil and having your brain switched on ready for your learning. Pause the video if you need to get a pencil or paper. Introducing the author and book. The author, David Walliams. Oh, I couldn't hear you. Let's try it one more time. David Walliams. Here a picture of the author of the "Demon Dentist," David Walliams. Now he is a very famous author, but he's not just famous for writing books. In fact, he's a comedian, he's a TV personality also. You've probably seen or read one of his books already. Can you tell me if you do know any of his books? There are so many. A few of my favourites are "Mr. Stink," "Billionaire Boy" and "Awful Auntie," but the list does go on. I suppose, most importantly, the reason why I keep on picking up this author's books is because he is so funny. So humour is a theme that runs through all his books. In fact, quite often, I do laugh out loud as I'm reading his books. So I hope you really enjoy the book we're going to read a little bit of today. I'm very excited to be sharing it with you. Let's see what it is. The "Demon Dentist." It's not one of his most recent books, but it's definitely one of his very popular books. Let's have a look at the front cover. I want you to think about the setting, the characters and what the front cover tells you about the story so far. Pause the video here and look for clues. And write them down, making notes as you go. I want you to press play when you're ready to carry on with the lesson. Well done. If I was to look at this cover, I can see there's a young boy and a lady here. It looks like she's definitely a dentist. She's got this type of clothing I'd expect to dentists to use. She's got something in her hand, which perhaps a normal dentist would not use. So maybe this is where David Walliams has thought about adding in some dark humour to this book. Let's focus on the young boy now. First of all, what's he sitting on? It doesn't look like a normal dentist chair to me. In fact, it looks a bit like a throne, which is a bit odd to me. So there's something strange going on about this particular dentist practise. That's a place where a dentist works from. And if we look at the expressions on both of these characters, we might be able to tell a bit more about their relationship. So perhaps you had written down that this dentist looks a little bit sinister, little bit evil, doesn't she? She's got a bit of a smirk, a smile on her face. And the boy, I don't think he looks very happy here. In fact, his mouth is wide open. That might be because he's in a dentist chair and needing to get his teeth checked. But actually, I think I can see some other emotions on his face. Perhaps you're sensing some fear in his eyes or in his body language. It looks like he's gripping the sides, really clenching the sides of the chair, which may suggest he's feeling quite uneasy or quite stressed. I wonder if you spotted the third character on our front cover? A cat wrapped around the dentist's legs. So I think this is her cat. They look quite similar, don't they? Maybe this cat has a similar personality to the dentist. Maybe they're quite close and are always together. Let's see if there's any more clues. I think the title gives us a very big clue, doesn't it? "Demon Dentist." Let's talk about what a demon is. A demon is the name for an evil spirit. This definitely adds to the dark character of the dentist here. Did you notice that are many different packets of sweets and if you look really closely, there also is some fake teeth, we call them dentures, next to the boy on a stand on the top. It's a bit hard to tell what this is. There's lots of bubbles coming out of a cup. So what might this drink be? I think this cup might be a really sugary, fizzy drink that's also bad for your teeth. Let's summarise now and check your understanding of what we've looked at so far. I want you to answer true and false to these statements below. So let's read them together and then we're going to pause and give you some time to think about these. There are two main characters. The boy seems delighted to be visiting the dentist. This story is a dark comedy. Pause the video here and decide which one's true or false. Then press play when you want to resume. Okay, let's look at the answer, shall we? There are two main characters. True. Although we did see the cat as well, it seems like these two characters, the dentist and the boy are going to be the main characters. The boys seems delighted to be visiting the dentist. False. This statement is false because we saw the expression on his face. He didn't seem delighted to be there, did he? This story is a dark comedy. This statement is true because there's already some evil looking themes just from the front cover, such as the word demon and the appliance, the thing the dentist had in her hand and even the look she had on her face. Let's look at the first section of the book. Prologue. What is a prologue? It's a section of a book at the beginning that is separate from the main part of the story. I'm going to read this to you. "Prologue, darkness had come to the town. Strange things were happening in the dead of the night. Children would put a tooth under that pillow at bed time, excitedly waiting for the tooth fairy to leave a coin. In the morning, they would wake up to find something unspeakable under there. A dead slug, a live spider, hundreds and hundreds of earwigs, creeping and crawling beneath their pillow or worse, much worse." Next, I want you to read the prologue for yourself. So here's the text on the screen. I want you to pause the video here, read it carefully because I'm going to ask you some questions after you've read it. Press play when you finished reading. Time for your first task. So which of the phrases make you feel suspense and mystery. You can use some of these sentence starters to help you. I think the phrase or this phrase. Pause the video now and write at least two sentences to answer this question. Press play to resume the lesson after you finished. So here are some of the phrases I picked out of the prologue that create suspense for me. "Strange things." This makes me think there's something mysterious at play here. "Dead of the night." This means in the middle of the night, when it's really dark and creates an eerie sort of feeling and atmosphere. "Something unspeakable." Well, this makes me think that it could be anything, something supernatural maybe. "Or worse. Much worse." Here David Walliams is using repetition and he's also using three dots, which we call an ellipsis to create suspense. "Someone or something." We don't know whether it's going to be a person, it's still a mystery. And finally, "Evil was at work." So to complete a full sentence, you might have had something like this. Remember it's important to include a piece of evidence from the text in your answer. The phrase, "Strange things in the night" creates suspense because it shows that it is unknown what is causing these things to happen. So it creates mystery and leaves us to use our imagination. If you would like to edit your own answer, maybe you want it to include one of the phrases we've got on the screen now or maybe you want to edit it so you've got some of those key words like mystery or suspense there, pause the video now and make those edits. So the next thing I noticed when I was reading the prologue is that David Walliam has used some questions. Let's read them together. "But who or what was behind it?" "How could they sneak into children's bedrooms without being seen?" "And what could they possibly want with all those teeth?" We have a name for these type of questions. I want you to pause the video here and think about what we call these type of questions. And why did David Walliams use them in the prologue? Press play when you're ready for the answers. Okay, good job. This is a difficult one. They're called rhetorical questions. And they're asked in order to create a dramatic effect rather than an answer. So this is often a type of language device that authors use to keep a reader's interest and to build tension. Here are two parts of the book before the first chapter starts. Did these match your first impression or predictions? Pause the video here to think about this question and press play when you're ready. Let's look at the picture first. Why has a shadow of the dentist been used? And what has she got in her hand? Is this adding to your impression of her character, building your idea that she's an evil character. "Beware. This is a horror story." Straightaway we're being warned, which is building up the suspense and tension. Next, I want you to complete a task, all about prediction. So we know a bit more about the characters and the themes. I want you to write two sentences to explain your predictions so far. So pause the video here and use some of these sentence starters to help you. Press play when you're ready. Now, it's time to look at key vocabulary in context. First of all, I'm going to show you what I do when I come across a word that is unfamiliar to me, that means I don't understand it. Or if I'm not quite sure why it's used there. Let's read this together. "In the morning, they would wake up to find something unspeakable under there. Unspeakable is the word we're thinking of. So some strategies I use, when I'm not sure of the word, is first I skip out the word in the sentence. "In the morning, they would wake up to find something under there." Okay? So I know that this is a word that's describing the something that's under the pillow of the children. So maybe I can try and replace the word with another word. "In the morning, they would wake up to find something scary under there." Let's see another strategy I can use. I can read around the word. That means look at the beginning and the end of the sentence to help me with the meaning. Well, I already know it's a word to describe something under the pillow. So what word class is it? It's an adjective, a describing word, and they're waking up to find something under there. Now, maybe this time I can look at a word inside a word, unspeakable. If I speak about something, I might be really excited about it. If there's something unspeakable, what might that mean? Let's look at the definition. Unspeakable is an adjective that describes something that's too bad or horrific to be expressed in words. It's so awful that you wouldn't want to talk about it. Okay, now you've seen how we can use strategies when we come across unfamiliar words. I want you to have a go at one yourself. Read this part of the text independently, picking out the word, blood-curdling. I want you to use all of these strategies to try and think about what the meaning of this word is. Perhaps you do know the meaning of this word already, but it's really important to practise these strategies so that if you do come across a word in your reading, you're not sure of that we do try and find out the meaning and not just skip past it. Take your time, pausing the video here, to think about the word. Good job. So perhaps you looked at the word inside the word blood and curdling to try and think more about the meaning. Blood-curdling is a strong adjective because it describes causing or expressing terror or horror, being extremely scared. So it's often use when talking about screams as well. Reading the text. We're going to start reading from chapter three. "Whiter than white." As before, I'm going to read the text to you because it might be a little bit difficult for you to read off the screen. But if you wish to read it yourself, that's fine. Pause the video here. Press play when you want to continue with your lesson. "Whiter than white. The whole of the lower school was gathered in the hall. The few hundred children was sitting in rows of chairs, awaiting the guest speaker. No one interesting ever visited Alfie's school. On Prize-giving Day, the guest of honour had been a man who made the cardboard for cornflake packets. The cornflake-cardboard man's speech was so mind numbingly boring even he fell asleep delivering it. Today there was a talk from the town's new dentist. It was to be a lecture about looking after your teeth. Not wildly exciting, but at least it meant they were all out of lessons for awhile, thought Alfie. Not liking dentists, Alfie sat himself right in the back row In his bedraggled school uniform. The shirt was once white, but it had long since gone grey. His jumper was full of holes. His blazer was torn in several places. His trousers were too short for him. Nevertheless, Alfie's father had taught him to wear his uniform with pride. The boy's frayed tie was always knotted absolutely perfectly. Slumped next to Alfie was the only kid in school shorter than him. A very little girl called Gabz." And that's where we're going to pause for this lesson, but don't worry. Next lesson, we're going to pick up where we stopped. I want to think about what we know about the first key character that's been focused on in this chapter. Alfie, the little boy, what we know about him already and what we know about where the story's set and what's happened so far. So time to summarise. Here I've got some statements. I want you to read them and decide whether they're true or false. Let's read them together. And then I want you to pause the video. The whole school are gathered in the hall for a talk. There was a new doctor in town. Alfie is smartly dressed. Take your time and then press play to check your answers. Here they are then. Let's try saying why they are true or false in a full sentence using our sentence starters below. The whole school are gathered in the hall for a talk. This statement is true because in the text it says "The whole school are waiting for a speaker to come in." There is a new doctor in town. This statement is false because there is a new dentist in town, not a doctor. That was a bit of a trick one. And finally, Alfie is smartly dressed. This statement is false because in the text it says, "His uniform is very dirty and grey in colour." Well done if you got some of those correct. it's quite difficult to try and take everything in as you're reading, but it's really good for us to practise proving false statements to make sure we've understood what we've read so far. Well done today. You've completed your lesson and this means, for the next lesson we're feeling ready to read more of the "Demon Dentist." I'm really looking forward to it. See you next time.

Completed: To engage with the text

In this lesson, we will be introduced to the author and the book and use clues from the front cover and prologue to make some predictions about the story.

English

To engage with the text

Video

Lesson Complete