Video: To introduce the context and genre of a text

﻿Hello, welcome to this new English unit. My name's Mrs. Smart. What's your name? Nice to meet you. I absolutely love reading. So much that it can be quite difficult for me to get my nose out of a book sometimes. One of my favourite things about reading is I love learning about people and events from the past. I can't wait to share this book with you. Right, let's get started. In this lesson you will need an exercise book or some lined paper, a pen or pencil to write with, and a ruler or a straight edge. You also need to try and find a quiet space with no distractions, so you can really focus on your learning. Pause the recording, and get yourself ready for today's lesson. Here is the agenda for our lesson today. We're going to start with an introduction where I'm going to introduce the text that we're going to be focusing on in this unit. We're then going to explore some of the texts features. After we'll learn a little bit more about Mary Anning. That's the person our book is all about. Then we'll end today's lesson with your independent task, where you'll have a chance to consolidate all of your learning from our lesson. Here is the front cover of the book that we are going to be exploring together over the next five lessons. I've got to copy here as well, in the flesh. It's called History VIP, Mary Anning, written by Kay Barnham. First of all, we're going to consider these two questions. What genre do you think this text is? Can you infer what this text is about? Don't worry if you don't know what genre or infer mean at the moment, because we're about to learn that. Repeat after me, genre. Genre. Genre means a style or category of art, music, or literature. In this context, we're talking about literature because we're talking about a text or a book. Synonyms are words that have the same or similar meaning are text type, category, and style. And we could use it in a sentence like this biographies are a popular genre of book. Then we've got the word infer. Repeat after me. Infer. Infer. Infer is a verb, it's something we do. It means to work something out from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements. So often I think of it a little bit like being a detective, looking for clues and working something out. Synonyms are deduce, conclude, and reason. And we could use it in a sentence like this. I can infer how a character feels from their actions. So if a character skips into a room smiling, I know they're probably happy. I can work it out from the clues. We're now going to do a little bit of inferring or inference from the front cover. We're going to look at the clues from the pictures and the text and see what we can predict or work out about this book. I want you to pause the recording and write down anything you can predict about this book, just from the front cover. Off you go. How did you get on? Did you write lots of notes down? Well done if you did. I'm going to show you my thoughts now. So I noticed that there's a picture of a woman or a young woman on the front cover. So I'm guessing this book is all about this woman. She's wearing an old fashioned coat and hat. You might call the hat a bonnet. So I'm going to predict that this woman isn't alive anymore. And she lived quite a long time ago because people don't really dress like that anymore. She's carrying a tool. It looks a bit like a hammer or a pickax and a basket. I wonder what those are for. Maybe they're something to do with her job. Now let's have a look at the text, the writing, it says History VIP. I know that VIP means very important person, so I can work out that she must be a very important person from history. And this is a series of books called History VIP, and each book covers a different person from history. Mary Anning, I'm pretty sure is her name. And that must be who this woman is on the front cover. Fossil hunter and dinosaur expert. Ah, maybe that's her job or her occupation, or maybe it's just a hobby, maybe it's something that she likes doing. And that could explain the tool and the baskets. Then it says brilliant biographies. I know that her biography is a text about someone. So this text must be about her, but written by someone else. And then it says dead famous. Now I know there's two different meanings for dead famous. It can mean really famous, or it can also mean that she's not alive anymore. So I know that she's probably not alive anymore because of her old fashioned clothing. Wow. We worked out so much about this book without even opening the front cover. I now want you to try and answer these... To try to answer these two questions that we looked at before. What genre do you think this text is? And can you infer what this text is about? There are some sentence starters in green to help you. So I want you to write two full sentences. I think the genre of this text is, because. So you need to explain or reason your answer. And then I think this text is about, because. Again, you need to explain your answer. Pause the recording and write your two sentences now. Hopefully you thought the genre of this text was nonfiction and it was a biography. Well done if you wrote that. And can you infer what this text is about? Hopefully you inferred that the text is about someone called Mary Anning, who was a famous fossil hunter and dinosaur expert. We are going to be learning all about her in the next five lessons. Let's just go over what some of these key words mean. The first one is nonfiction. Repeat after me, nonfiction. Nonfiction. Nonfiction is a text that is informative or factual rather than fiction. So fiction means made up not true, things like stories, for example. But nonfiction of factual information texts that tell us real life, true information. Synonyms could be factual and true, and we could use it in a sentence like this. Mary Anning's biography is a nonfiction text. Let's just make sure we understand what a biography is. Repeat after me, biography. Biography. A biography is an account of someone's life, but it's written by someone else. Do you know what the text is called if it's a biography, but it's written by the person that the text is about? Well done, it's called an auto-biography. An auto-biography is written by the person about that person. A biography is written about someone's life, but it's written by someone else. So this book is a biography about Mary Anning, but it's written by Kay Barnham. Synonyms could be recounts, accounts, and life story. And in a sentence, we could use the word biography like this. The biography of Mary Anning gives information about her life. Let's have a look at the back cover now. The back cover here gives us a little bit more information about this text. This is often called the blurb. It's a summary of the text and it can tell us what the text is about before we open it up. It can be really useful to look at a blurb when you're trying to choose what book you want to read. Born into a family in Lyme Regis, Mary Anning began life with little opportunity for success. But with determination and curiosity, she made a name for herself by collecting and studying fossils. Soon, she knew more about prehistoric life than many top palaeontologists. Learn about her amazing story inside. And then you can see on the bottom there, a few of those other books called History VIP, which are about other people from history. We're now going to have a look at some of the text features that are specific to a biography or any sorts of nonfiction information book. The first page we're going to look at is called the contents page. And if I have a look at my book here, it's on the second page of the book. It's called the contents page. Have a good look at it. What is the purpose of this page? Pause the recording and write down your idea now. The purpose of the contents page is it tells you what page each section is on. So if I wanted to find out all about her fossilist friends, for example, I could go to page 24. It makes it a little bit easier to find your way or navigate your way through a book rather than having to search through the whole thing. Then we've got the index page. Now the index page can be found right at the back of the book. What is the purpose of the index page? Pause the recording and write down your answer now. The index page is a little bit like the contents page, but it goes into more specific details. So rather than listing whole sections of the text, it lists more specific details. For example, if I wanted to find out about the Jurassic coast, I could go to page nine, page 20, and page 29. And the Jurassic coast would be mentioned on all three pages. Now we've got the glossary and similarly to the index that can be found at the back of the book. Let me find it here. There we go. There's the glossary. Have a little look at the glossary page. What is the purpose? Pause the recording and write down your answer now. The glossary is a little bit like a dictionary. It gives us definitions for words. And you might notice in the book that some words are in bold. And that tells me that their definition is going to be at the back in the glossary. Authors often choose trickier words or maybe more scientific or subject specific words that we might not be familiar with to define in the glossary, and just in case someone doesn't know what a word means. It helps them to understand the text. Now this book also has a timeline, and again the timeline is right at the back of the book. There it is. what is the purpose of the timeline? Pause the recording and write down your answer now. The timeline's really useful, especially for a biography, because it can tell us when things happened in Mary Anning's life. So we can see that in 1796, Joseph Anning, Mary's brother is born, and then 1799, Mary Anning is born. And we can then see in chronological order, that means in time order, different events that happened while she was alive. Let's now have a look at the first double page in the book. I don't want you to do any reading yet. I just want you to have a look at the layout features. That means the features that structure or organise the text. There are four arrows on this picture that might help you to identify some of the different layout features. Can you identify each one and have a think about what is their purpose? Why are they there? Pause the recording and write down your answers now. Right, let's have a look at these layout features. The first one is the title. Hopefully you identified that. The title is right at the top, at the beginning of the double page. And it tells me what that double page or that section is all about. And that will also correspond to our contents page. We've got lots of images on this double page. Some of the images are drawings and some of the images are actual portraits that are very old. So you can see here on the left-hand side, there is a portrait of Mary Anning that was done a long time ago. But then most of the drawings are done in more modern times because they're more cartoon style. There are also some photographs. You can see some of the fossils, they look a little bit like shells. They are photographs that are dotted around the page as well. And they just add a bit of interest for the reader. They might help the reader to understand the text. Then on this side, we've got a subheading. A subheading is a little bit like a title, but it tells you what a certain section is about. And then here we've got a text box, or sometimes we might call it a fact box. That's a way of separating information from the rest of the text. And you can see this text box has a subheading of, "Who Was She?" So then the text box goes into a little bit more detail about facts, facts about Mary Anning, such as her date of birth, where she lived, who her parents were, et cetera. We are going to be learning a lot about Mary Anning in this unit. First of all, I want you to have a think about what would you like to find out about Mary Anning? We know that she is a fossil hunter and a dinosaur expert. Anything else that we want to find out about her? Pause the recording and try and write down three questions that you would like to answer about Mary Anning during this unit. Off you go. Okay, I've thought of a few questions. You might have the same or you might have some different ones. I had, where did she live? Who were her family? What did her job involve? How did she become a fossil hunter and dinosaur expert? And why is she famous? You might've had some of the same questions. You might have had some different ones as well. Here's a little bit of information about Mary Anning to whet your appetite for our next lesson where we're going to be finding out more about her life. Mary Anning was born on the 21st of May, 1799. She lived in the English seaside town of Lyme Regis in Dorset. Her family were very poor, which meant she didn't get to attend school much. Mary spent her time searching the coast looking for fossils. She made many incredible discoveries and became one of the most important scientists in history. And you can see that same portrait of her on the screen that we saw earlier on the first page of the book. If you're not sure a fossil is any evidence of past animal or plant life. This could include bones, shells, and stone imprints of animals. And here is one of the fossils that Mary Anning found in Lyme Regis. And this is actually now displayed in the natural history museum in London. Now, if you have a look at the map on the left-hand side, the little yellow dots shows you where she lived, and where she grew up, and where she found all her fossils. This is a place called Lyme Regis, which is a town in Dorset. And you can see it's right on the coast. That means it's on the edge of the land, where the land meets the sea. So it's a seaside town. For your task today, I would like you to consolidate all of your learning. I want you to create a mind map of all the features of the Mary Anning in biography text. So think back through everything that we've looked at today. A mind map might look a little bit like this. So in the middle of your page, you're going to write text features and then around the outside, you're going to write down some of the features that you remember looking at in today's lesson. I've started you off with titles and contents page. What else can you remember? If you can't remember, you can just rewind through the recording and watch the lesson again. Congratulations. You have completed your first lesson in this unit. I hope you've enjoyed starting to then little bit about Mary Anning. I look forward to seeing you in your next lesson. Goodbye.

Lesson summary: To introduce the context and genre of a text

In this lesson we will analyse the front cover to infer the genre and subject of the text. We will then explore some of the key features of non-fiction texts and consider their purpose.

English

To introduce the context and genre of a text

Video

Lesson summary: To introduce the context and genre of a text

Time to move!

Browse Oak's lessons:

Take part in The Big Ask.