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Learning Challenges
3 sections, 33 learning challenges and 1 great learning adventure.
Here's your chance to explore each section of The Writing Palette.
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Why We Write
Investigate and explore what inspires or motivates you to write. Watch a video with twenty-four of the most inspirational quotes about the power of writing and what it can bring to your life. Choose your quote, then print it, laminate it and place it somewhere visible. Let it inspire you to always value the words you use and what they create.
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Colons and Semicolons
Level 1: The London Labyrinth: This challenge allows you to understand how colons and semicolons can be used in sentences. You get the chance to inspect Victorian prisons, visit Covent Garden Market, explore ‘Dirty Old London', or educate yourself on life during Queen Victoria's reign. Level 2: Sherlock Holmes: The Unfinished Cases: It's your chance to assume the character of Sherlock Holmes. Your task is to finish writing up the case files of criminals that you've investigated and brought to justice. You'll carefully use semicolons and colons to finish writing up your notes. Level 3: The Case of the Fool and the Feathers: Take part in a Sherlock Holmes mystery called ‘The Fool and the Feathers'. Throughout the twists and turns of this story, you'll have to add semicolons and colons to a series of sentences to reveal the dark truths lurking in the small town of Sunbury-on-Thames.
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Subordinate Clauses
Level 1: Heroes and Villains: Here you'll encounter sentences about famous superheroes and villains that use subordinating conjunctions. You'll be challenged to see whether you can spot when they're being used correctly and also learn to write descriptions using them. Level 2: Challenge 1: The Seven Ages of Man: Using a performance of William' Shakespeare's ‘All the World's a Stage', you'll create a series of sentences using relative pronouns that explore life from cradle to grave. Level 2: Challenge 2: Beyond the Play: In this challenge, major characters and settings from William Shakespeare's plays look to inspire you to create complex and engaging descriptions using relative pronouns. Level 2: Challenge 3: Your Play: During this activity, you'll be challenged to include the key ingredients of Shakespeare’s plays in a series of descriptions using relative pronouns. Level 3: Go Your Own Way: Here you have the choice of two creative writing activities: ‘When Words Collide' and ‘A Beginning...Your Ending'. These challenges give you the chance to show your expert use of subordinate clauses.
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Direct Speech
Level 1: Direct Speech Detective: In this activity, you'll examine ten pieces of dialogue and fix them using your understanding of how to accurately write direct speech. Level 2: Altogether Now is your chance to develop a series of conversations using your ability to effectively punctuate and structure direct speech. Level 3: Talk to Me: Use a gallery of over twenty images to create a series of conversations that entertain your reader and show off your expert knowledge of direct speech.
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Alliteration
Level 1: Non-Stop Names: In this activity, you'll come across twenty-six descriptions of people dealing with the trials and tribulations of life. Your challenge is to add alliteration that reflects what's happening to the characters that are being described. Level 2: Nourishing Nature: In the ‘Gap Guess' challenge, you'll need to insert adjectives or verbs to create alliteration so that it manipulates how we emotionally feel about nature in a description. In the ‘Picture Perfect' challenge, you'll use a series of images to help you write powerful descriptions about nature using alliteration. Level 3: Fervent Feelings: During this challenge, you'll use alliteration to create descriptions that explore how different emotions make people think or behave.
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Onomatopoeia
Level 1: Write Words: This is your chance to use onomatopoeia to influence the emotional and psychological impact of a sentence. You'll be given a sentence with a gap missing and a choice of onomatopoeic words to fill it. Choose your words wisely, as they will affect the hearts and minds of your readers. Level 2: Piece Together: During this challenge, you'll be given a place, an object, and an onomatopoeic word. Your task is to make a sentence out of these three different pieces of information. Level 3: The Ekman Ten: During the 1970s, psychologist Paul Ekman identified ten basic emotions that he suggested were universally experienced in all human cultures. Your challenge is to write a sentence using onomatopoeia to bring each of these emotions alive for a reader using a'sound-bank' of over a hundred onomatopoeic words.
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Personification
Level 1: Spot On: This exercise is about seeing whether you can spot examples of personification. You'll see a series of sentences with a section missing, and your task will be to fill the gap with a piece of personification. For each question, there'll be a list of words or expressions to choose from. However, only one of the words or expressions in the list will be an example of personification. Level 2: Connect it: Here, your challenge is to bring inanimate objects alive using personification. You'll be able to choose an object and verbs from a series of lists to help you in this process. There are four subject areas to explore: weather, home, travel and nature. Level 3: Inside Out: In this activity, you'll use a short video clip as a stimulus to write the beginning of a piece of fiction; there are fourteen to choose from. Each video will show you a number of inanimate objects that you can bring alive using personification.
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Juxtaposition
Level 1: Opposites Attract: In this activity, you'll have to try and spot as many examples of juxtaposition as you can in a series of images. Level 2: Absent Opposites: In this activity, you'll be presented with a series of short films; there are fifteen in total. Your challenge is to use your imagination to think of something that could be added to the action that would create juxtaposition. Level 3: Stick Together: This challenge is about piecing together juxtaposed words into sentences so that they entertain and provoke. You'll choose from twenty-eight examples of juxtaposition, e.g. asleep or awake, to write a description.
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The Five Senses
Level 1: Life in the Picture: In this challenge, you'll use a series of images to create descriptions that pair adjectives with nouns so that your reader uses their five senses. Level 2: A Moment in Time: This activity involves you using five video clips to create descriptions that fully engage the five senses of your reader. Level 3: Part 1: Musical Landscapes: This introduction shows you how music can inspire people to create visual landscapes that thrill and entertain an audience. Level 3: Part 2: Musical Landscapes: Your World: In this activity, you'll listen to five different pieces of instrumental music. After choosing your favourite song, you'll create a visual landscape that will help you write the beginning of a story that engages your reader's five senses.
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