Persuasive writing and Greenpeace

People love to send me films and I have been sent this one quite a few times over the last few weeks. 
'Rang Tan' is an educational film made by Greenpeace to educate people about the destruction of the rainforests due to human intrusion, primarily from the Palm Oil manufacturers. 

These resources are adapted from the great resources that were developed by Greenpeace on the subject.  The originals can be found here 

When using this film with a group of Y4 children this week to tie into their Rainforests topic we began by finding out lots about Orangutans. 

We began by watching this short film from YouTube. 

The children then created information sheets about Orangutans using the templates below.  The objectives of the lesson here were twofold, the children practise their reading skills in order to find the information but also to improve their knowledge of Orangutans in order to write about them in the following lesson.   Before reading, we discussed and contextualised the tricky words from the image below. 

The Reading Sheet

Response/Poster Sheet without questions

Response/Poster sheet

Tricky Words
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Click here to download the resources

In the next session we watched the 'Rang Tan' video voiced by Emma Thompson and discussed the dual narrative and the story it told.   The children followed the text and read along.  There are opportunities here for performance, the children could choose a section to perform dramatically. 

Following the reading sessions, we then decided that we would write letters to the Prime Minister in protest against palm oil products in the UK.

This began with a discussion about persuasion.  We decided that we should describe the beauty of the Orangutan as in the model below.  This would act as a persuasive device as people are more likely to protest for something if they have a relationship with them. 

The second part of the writing will involve a number of persuasive devices such as repetition to echo the forest and rhetorical questions to make the audience think. 

I shall update with examples of children's work when complete.

If you would like to see further resources like this on www.literacyshedplus.com please comment to below.