Instruction writing can be tedious but it doesn’t have to be boringly tedious. Last week I happened to see a tweet from Tom Barrett which showed that he and his class had a lot of fun writing instructions to survive a shark attack! Now, that’s definitely not a boringly tedious writing task so during the weekend I set about to piece together a much improved and exciting instructional writing task.

How to survive an avalanche

This definitely had a lot to do with the story of the climber who fell 1000ft down a vertical cliff face but somehow managed to not only survive but was found standing searching his map! The following ideas can be used as they are or adapted to suit your own class needs.

Watch this video with your class

This will set the mood. My class were bug eyed with the spectacle and had so many questions afterwards. We broke off into buddy groups to find out what we would do to survive an avalanche and made notes of these for later.

Next, get your groups to use whiteboards or notebooks during the next video as they will need to note down how to survive an avalanche. The interviewee has a few steps that skiers need to take if they want to survive and I found it was better to watch the video completely first, have a brief discussion then watch it again after each group sorted out who would take notes on what part of the video. We also decided to make sure we noted any ‘bossy words’, time connectives and technical vocabulary.

We then had a quick discussion to confirm whether our initial thoughts were similar to the experts and we actually found that some were, although one suggestion (jumping into a tree and climbing to the top) wasn’t on the experts list.

What I found.
I found children were more engaged by the activity than one that would merely have been writing instructions to something relating directly to them. The whole class were buzzing with the task and today we started creating our instruction guides in the form of posters and leaflets. We hope to have a few completed tomorrow so I will post those here or on the class blog for you to see.

What next.

Using film media in the classroom should never be overlooked as a resource, that’s why we are going to look at ‘How to survive a Twister’ next.