A Time-Traveller's Guide

We're going to need some key vocabulary for our upcoming project. Complete the Hangman challenges below, and for each one write down one-sentence definitions in your book.

What do you need to know?

You're about to be teleported to somewhere random in place and time. What 5 questions would be useful for you to Google before you go?

Discuss with your partner, then write down your five questions.

You can also bring three items from your house with you: which ones?

If you had to pick a different period in history to be sent to, which one would you pick, and why?

Starting our guides

LO: To consider what we need to include in our guides.

What makes a travel guide useful? What sort of information should be in it?

What would a Guide to Repton Al Barsha need to include?

Our project

Over the next few lessons, we're going to create a TIME-TRAVELLERS GUIDE TO ANCIENT ROME.

Before we start, we're going to think about what makes a useful guide.

With your partner, discuss the last time you visited a country or place you'd never been to before. What was strange? What did you not understand?

What do you think new arrivals in Dubai find difficult to understand?

What goes in a guide?

Dubai is one of the most popular travel destinations in the world. To help visitors, the government has created the Visit Dubai website, containing all sorts of useful information.

Visit Dubai 🌐

Browse the website, and write down a list of all the useful sorts of information that is included:

  1. Travel details...
  2. ....

Rank the information by importance

PLENARY: Deciding on sections

You're going to write a travel guide to Ancient Rome, for time-travellers.

  • What sections are you going to include in your guide? Why?
  • What research will you need to conduct?
  • What knowledge will you assume your readers have already?

What type of language will you use? What tone will you take?

Planning our guide

LO: To layout what we will include in our guides, and to start writing

Rank these items in order of importance to bring on holiday:

  • Passport
  • Cash money
  • Change of clothes
  • Smartphone
  • Spare battery

What would you do if you were dropped somewhere new with NONE of these things?

Planning our time-traveller's guide

Last lesson, you started planning which sections will be in your guide.

Complete your planning today, noting down which parts of the guide you're going to include

Some suggestions...

          |
 🌤️Climate| 🐴 Travel
  ________|________
          |
 🏰 Sights| 🍖 Food
          |

Set yourself a To-Do list of tasks you'll need to complete to write each section

Research

Now you've selected your main parts of the guide, you can start researching information to use.

You can use these sources to learn more about Life in Ancient Rome.

🍎 What they ate and wore

💼 How they worked and played

🧭 Map of Rome

Drafting the guide

LO: To start drafting our guides

Which of the following sentences are most suitable for a travel guide? Why?

1️⃣ "There are loads of great restaurants in Dubai. My favourite ones are the ones which serve burgers and milkshakes."

2️⃣ "If you're looking for somewhere to eat, why not try TimeOut Market? You can enjoy views of the famous Burj Khalifa while you eat"

3️⃣ "There are 13,233 restaurants and cafés in Dubai. The majority are located in the Downtown and Al Barsha areas, serving 4.3 million customers daily."

Write your own restaurant recommendation!

Writing for a purpose

We write for many reasons...

  • To entertain
  • To persuade
  • To inform

Which purpose are we hoping to fulfil for our readers when we write a travel guide?

What sort of language should we use when writing? Will it be direct, chatty, forceful, plain, descriptive etc?

Writing and researching

Plan and write your time-Traveller's Guide to Ancient Rome

Research sources:

🍎 What they ate and wore

💼 How they worked and played

🧭 Map of Rome

Layout and design

LO: To continue working on our guides.

Add to the various sections you start yesterday

How can you make the page more visually appealing to a reader?

Design with purpose

How is this page designed to make the information easier to read?

Write down five bullets.

Travel guide example

Which design elements could you add to your guide?

  • Pictures
  • Subheadings
  • Fact-boxes
  • Use of colour

Continuing Writing

Continue writing your guide, and add in those design elements!

📖 Travel Guide Example

🍎 What they ate and wore

💼 How they worked and played

🧭 Map of Rome

Eyewitnesses to History

LO: To consider how we can write first-person descriptions

Share one of your sections with your partner, and provide each other with two EBI comments and two WWW comments.

Which ideas of theirs could you steal for your guide?

I lay on the sand and watched an eagle circling overhead. I could feel it burn the soft skin on the sides of my feet. It was hot.
At midday we went on, passing high, pale-coloured dunes, and others that were golden, and in the evening we wasted an hour skirting a great mountain of red sand, probably 650 feet in height. Beyond it we travelled along a salt-flat, which formed a corridor through the Sands.
Looking back I imagined the great, red dune was a door which was slowly, silently closing behind us. I watched the narrowing gap between it and the dune on the other side of the corridor, and imagined that once it was shut we could never go back, whatever happened. The gap vanished and now I could see only a wall of sand.

from Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger

How does the writer make you feel like you are in the dunes with him? Select three short quotations.

Writing an eyewitness account

The extract you just read was written by Wilfred Thesiger, an adventurer who travelled around the deserts of the Saudi Arabia in the early 20th Century.

His travel writing evokes the feeling of these strange and inhospitable places, using sensory description to make the reader feel like they're there.

Write three of your own short quotations describing the heat of Dubai that we experience at the moment. Remember to use the senses!

Can you do the same for the cold of another place?

An Hour in the Forum

To accompany your guide, you should now write a first-person description of what it would be like, standing in the Forum of Rome: the main meeting place in the city.

Write two paragraphs of first-person description of the Forum. Try to include:

  • Sensory language (sight, smell, sound etc)
  • Metaphors/similes where appropriate
  • Descriptions of small details