Lesson 13: include facts and opinion in a newspaper report

In this lesson you will:

• list factual events in an incident in chronological order
• imagine how characters may have responded and imagine their thoughts
• include direct and reported speech

Read The Fairgrounds to Home. You can listen here.

Think about what happened leading up to and including Auggie's run-in with the other children.

Create a timeline and add the main events, in chronological order. You could start with arriving at the the camp and end with Auggie's hearing aids being found.

You are going to write a newspaper article about the events in The Fairground, up to the conclusion of the hearing aids being discovered in the locker. Before you do that, you need to prepare and to plan.

Choose 3 characters from the story (one of them must be Auggie, one must be from the group that picked on Auggie and his friends and the third should either be one of Auggie's friends or one of the adults with Auggie. Write each name in the centre of a piece of paper and then make notes about the incident from that person's perspective (from their point of view). 

• What would their version of events be?
• Whose side might they be on?
• Do they feel they have been treated justly?
• How do they explain their behaviour?
• What next for that character?
• If they were interviewed by a reporter, what might they say? Write this in your notes as direct speech, e.g. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that freak, I mean, gross or what?"

Repeat this for each of the three characters you have chosen.

Make sure you complete the direct and reported speech lesson

before the next Wonder lesson.