There’s a Rang-Tan in my Bedroom Project

Mr Hall’s Year 5 English class at QEH Junior School in Bristol, England are a keen, committed group of young writers. They care passionately about the environment and about writing with genuine purpose. They want to be heard and they have fully adopted their teacher’s belief that young people’s writing should be shared, published and celebrated in creative ways, rather than being hidden away in an exercise book! 

Mr Hall has been a primary school teacher in Bristol for 17 years. He specialises in enhancing the school curriculum through the use of technology and particularly loves celebrating and sharing the writing of his pupils creatively through technology. He lives in Portishead with his wife, three children and his cat. He loves reading, football, rugby and bad jokes told to him by his pupils. 

Deconstructing a Text: To help us to generate some more writing ideas, we studied an extract from Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. We felt that the extract successfully created a similar sense of fear in the main character, and that some of the techniques used would be very useful when writing from the point of view of the orangutan. Again, we used the tools in Seesaw to annotate a screenshot of the text and pick out the powerful, effective techniques that Morpurgo used. The boys were then able to refer to these and their ideas on the stills of the advert when writing. Here are some examples of their work on Seesaw:

We also did some shared writing in class to try out a range of different sentence types that we thought might be effective. Here are the examples we came up with:

Celebrating and Sharing: Mr Hall used some of our videos to produce this film about our project. It has been shared on the QEH Junior School Facebook page and has had lots of views. It was also shared with Greenpeace who sent Mr Hall some lovely feedback about our work!

Writing to Companies: The final stage in our project was to write to major companies that purchase large amounts of palm oil. Many of the world’s palm oil users have made commitments in the past to only buy palm oil that hasn’t been produced through the deforestation of rainforests. However, pledges by major brands to stop buying palm oil from companies known to destroy rainforests have failed to stop the clearance of an area of forest in Indonesia the size of Los Angeles in the last three years (Greenpeace, 2018). It is clear that many brands and their suppliers are not abiding by their own pledges. This chart from Greenpeace illustrates this and names and shames some of the worst offenders. We felt it was our duty to contact these companies and ask them what more they plan to do to make sure they stop using ‘dirty palm oil’ in their products. We also wanted to show them our writing and videos to demonstrate the horrendous effects of deforestation on orangutans and other wildlife. We hoped this would remind them of the seriousness of the situation and why they have a responsibility to do more to stop deforestation.

Introduction: After watching Greenpeace’s ‘There’s a Rang-Tan in my Bedroom’ advert, my Year 5 English group felt inspired to use the short film as the basis for a project. The advert demonstrates the plight of a young orangutan in the rainforests of Indonesia. His home is destroyed by humans to make way for a palm oil plantation; the advert graphically shows how horrendous this must be for the beautiful creatures that live there. You can watch the advert again on You Tube here.

The Writing Process: We decided to write in the first person, imagining that we were the orangutan from the advert, watching their home being destroyed. We knew that we would have to work hard to put across the shock, fear, anger and frustration that the orangutan would have felt, so we spent quite a lot of time preparing to write and generating ideas. Firstly, we used stills from the advert and annotated them with descriptive ideas using the tools on Seesaw. Here are a couple of examples:

Rang-Tan - Greenpeace - #DropDirtyPalmOil

Here are some examples of our letters to companies, made using Adobe Spark Video.

We were thrilled to receive replies from some of the multi national companies we contacted via Facebook and Twitter. It has helped to teach the boys that the Internet and social media are not big, scary places, but instead are powerful communication tools that can be used as a force for good. It was a pleasing end to a brilliant writing project. We completed the project by selling a longer version of this book to our school community via the iBooks store, which enabled us to adopt an orangutan through the WWF. 

Just two examples of the responses our video letters received. 

Performing our Writing: After editing and improving our work, we performed our writing to camera in front of a green screen. Firstly, we typed up our finished pieces into Seesaw so Mr Hall could copy and paste our text into an autocue app called ‘I Can Present’ on his ipad. While filming, Mr Hall mirrored his ipad to the board so we could all enjoy each other’s words as they were read out. The autocue app made the filming process in front of a green screen much easier and helped to make the performances of our writing more powerful.

The Finished Performances: Because we filmed our performances in front of a green screen, we were then able to layer stills from the Rang-Tan advert behind the footage of us performing. To do this, we used an app called Green Screen Doink. We then shared our finished videos on Seesaw. Here are a couple for you to enjoy:

Here is Chad demonstrating the set up in the classroom:

An E-Book by Mr Hall’s Year 5 English class QEH Junior School, Bristol

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