Welcome Back Before you sit down get into

Welcome Back! Before you sit down, get into pairs.

Responsibility Pairs Over the course of this half term, you and your partner will be a ‘responsibility pair’. This means that you are responsible to each other. You will act as the final check for your partner’s work before I see it. Both get e-praise if either of you produce outstanding work. If one of you earns sweets/ rewards, you both get them. If work is inadequate, you will both need to stay behind until it is sorted. If behaviour is poor, the consequences will apply to both of you.

What do you associate with/ think of when you think of ‘father’? With your partner, come up with a mind -map for ‘father’. It needs to be in both books.

All My Sons: Stage set

Your task: As we read through the opening stage setting, you need to either label your diagram with the items on stage or draw them on. Pay attention to where they are.

All My Sons The back yard of the Keller home in the outskirts of an American town. August of our era. The stage is hedged on right and left by tall, closely planted poplars which lend the yard a secluded atmosphere. Upstage is filled with the back of the house and its open, unroofed porch which extends into the yard some six feet. The house is two storeys high and has seven rooms. It is nicely painted, looks tight and comfortable, and the yard is greed with sod, here and there plants whose season is gone. At the right, beside the house, the entrance of the driveway can be seen, but the poplars cut off view of its continuation downstage. In the left corner, downstage, stands the four-foot-high stump of a slender appletree whose upper trunk and branches lie toppled beside it, fruit still clinging to its branches. Downstage right is a small, trellised arbour, shaped like a sea shell, with a decorative bulb hanging from its forward-curving roof. Garden chairs and a table are scattered about. A garbage pail is on the ground next to the porch steps, a wire leaf-burner near it.

Question 1 List 4 items that are downstage.

Setting: Choice 1: Visual 10 minutes • You need to draw what you think the setting will look like from the audience’s perspective. Choice 2: Descriptive • Imagine that you are wandering around this backyard. Write a description of the place. Show off your vocabulary and language techniques Choice 3: Analytical • What does the setting suggest about either the people that live there or the play itself? • Use quotes from the opening stage description and produce an analytical paragraph responding to the question above.

All tables need to be pushed to edge of the room or stacked, with a semi-circle of chairs in the middle. Leave a gap in the seats where the board is. Everybody will need to see the board at points.

Before you sit down, find yourself a space with your partner. Imagine that you are old friends meeting for the first time in years. Create a short drama piece of your conversation. Add in: • One of you dislikes the other due to something that happened in the past. • One of you is American. • You realise that you do not actually know each other and it was mistaken identity.

Characters: Keller: 60 year old man. Uneducated. Boss of a factory Dr Jim Bayliss – nearly forty. Wisp of sadness clings to him. Frank – thirty-two – balding. Pleasant, opinionated man. Sue – Jim’s wife. Forty. Overweight. Lydia – Frank’s wife. Twenty seven. Laughing girl Will need: Bert, Mother, Ann

Homework Complete the Act 1 Section of your play journal. The full copy of the play can be found online or on the blog. Any issues with internet, let me know and I will sort out a paper copy.