What a picture! What a photograph!

Great focus for dark January days at school! Why not take a look at Pantomime characters with some of your children? We will be working on pantomime characters linked to a grammar focus with Year 5 in Ready Made French and Spanish, so the sequence activities below would fit well with this focus.

• Which traditonal pantomime characters  do the children already know?
• Show the children a range of colour photos of traditional characters.Number each character.
• Ask the children to listen as you call out adjectives as words, or in phrases and sentences to describe one or more of the characters.Can the children identify which character you are describing?
• Ask the children to talk on their tables through possible adjectives to describe the characters (colours, emotions, personality)
• Ask the children to talk on their table  through possible simple descriptions of hair and eye colour and physical features.
• Individually ask the children to focus on one of the characters and on mini whiteboards to write down either at word or phrase or sentence level a description of the character. (They must keep a note of the number of the photo).
• Ask the children to walk around the room and share their information with other children.They must work in twos and read aloud their words or phrases or sentences and the other child must try to guess which picture number is being described.The children swap roles and then move on to a new partner.
• Give the children a piece of paper and ask them to create a folded/ concertina piece of paper with a rounded top and bottom for the face and body. Here is a Dennis the Menace made for World Book Day a couple of years ago as an example for you.

• Ask the children to create their own new "21st Century Pantomime Character" .
• They should leave the top and bottom spaces  so that once they have created their characters , they can fold up the written sections and focus on designing the top and botton half drawings of their new Pantomime character. 
• And now finally you can display your new characters the class have created in class...