How can a Drink Drive advert help your students with ‘analysis’?

I like to take the theory out of activities sometimes, give students the chance to practice the skills with something really accessible, and then put the theory back in. So when earlier this term I wanted to create a 'written skill of the term' lesson for my new Year 10 Edexcel GCSE students I decided to develop their use of connectives to analyse using a Drink Drive TV Advert.

Here is the advert, which ran a few years back in which a man approaches the bar for a drink only for the barman to impersonate a series of people as the consequences of being caught drink driving unravel before the would be drinker.

I got my students to watch the advert a couple of times and then write down the series of events outlined by the barman's different voices, using connectives. It really got them focused on the technique of explaning the consequences of a course of action without having to worry about whether or not the theory they were using was correct. It gave us 10 to 15 minutes purely considering the technique they would need to use and the words/phrases they could employ to do it.

With this done, I then got them to apply their newly acquired skill to one of a selection of Business Studies questions on recently covered topics and found they had a real confidence in using this skill to develop their answer. This is part of a concerted strategy this year to develop written skills in our GCSE students from the very start of the course rather than focusing purrely on the multiple-choice style assessment of material that is generallt taught in Year 10 (Unit 1). We will be focusing on this skill this term, and the use of 'context' next term for which I'll use another activity called 'Such As Seasoning'. I'll blog about this separately some time soon.