-Introduction to poetry.
Whilst being introduced to poetry in year 7, students will be engaging with a wide range of poems to develop their love of reading. Lessons in this unit build upon prior knowledge of poetry from Primary phase but will challenge the students with new ideas, styles, and techniques. Students can expect to cover 20th century poetry from a range of canonical and non-traditional poets. They will be introduced to the skills of scansion and prosody alongside other close-reading skills, such as those associated structuralism and semiotics. Students will be engaging with the ways in which a writer shapes meaning through their choices in language and structure. An introductory understanding of these methods is central to the unit and forms the content of course, whilst the acts of comprehension, retrieval, inference, and analysis form the key skills of the course. Alongside reading skills, students will have the opportunity to practise writing poetry, applying the techniques they have studied to convey their own ideas and understanding. Students will learn about the importance of performance and oracy and will practise reading aloud their poems. Teachers have a range of poets to choose from, amongst those suggested are Ted Hughes, but teachers will choose an anthology of poems which best suits the interests and needs of the class. The introduction to poetry will be furthered in year 8 when students will further develop their understanding of the craft of poetry.
-Introduction to novels.
(‘Animal Farm’ or other novel)
The introduction to the novel in year 7 prepares students for dealing with complex and lengthy texts and stimulates their love of storytelling and reading. The unit provides an opportunity to engage with increasingly challenging texts and in doing so will develop the students’ vocabularies whilst allowing them to engage with complex ideas. They will be building upon their prior understanding of the craft of prose writing, considering discourse-level concepts such as characterisation and plot, whilst also furthering their skills with close-reading of key extracts; considering how writers shape meaning through their choices. Students will cover a range of reading skills essential for the appreciation of literature later in their school careers. Note taking, analysis, and research are all key components to the unit. Alongside studying the text in detail, students will be required to engage with the contexts of the texts in a historicist mode, considering ideas, events, and attitudes around the time of production and reception through the ages. Students will have the opportunity in this unit to develop their own story crafting and will respond to the novel in creative ways whilst simultaneously strengthening their grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation skills. Reading aloud in class is a central part of developing strong comprehension skills and satisfies the need to develop speaking and listening skills. The suggested text is ‘Animal Farm’ but teachers are encouraged to select a text which best suits their class. Within year 7, this unit links to the short story unit. The unit is further developed in year 8 when students further their knowledge and skills working with a more challenging text.
-Introduction to Shakespeare.
(‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ or other Shakespeare)
The introduction to Shakespeare prepares students for interaction with challenging and unfamiliar texts whilst introducing some of the key literary concepts associated with drama and dramatic production. In Year 7, any anxieties around studying an older canonical text will be addressed. The aim of the unit is to encourage interest in a rich and challenging text whilst building students’ confidence with the language and style. Students will be introduced to the complex plots, themes, and characters of a Shakespeare play. Elements of style and method, including but not limited to techniques of structure, setting and mise-en-scene, imagery, allusions, soliloquy, will be taught alongside comprehension of plot and the wider ideas associated with the narrative. Students will look in depth at extracts to explore Shakespeare’s language and verse and will link this to their whole-text understanding to introduce literary reading skills. They will respond creatively with their own dramatic writing using the text as a stimulus and they will have the opportunity to experiment with performance of key scenes to explore the speaking and listening skills. This unit is further developed in Year 8, when students will be applying the same skills with another Shakespeare play but using more sophisticated concepts and dealing with the themes in a more comprehensive way. The suggested text of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, though teachers are free to choose a text which best suits the interests of the class.
-Introduction to Journalism.
This unit prepares Year 7 students with the essential critical skills they will need to effectively decode, process, and evaluate the often conflicting perspectives of the modern media. They will be applying skills of comprehension, retrieval, inference, analysis, and evaluation to interact with a range of non-fiction texts. In terms of content, students will be learning about different forms of media and a range of language techniques used. They will cover both traditional print journalism and digital media and will be learning about the distinctions between those forms whilst considering how the digital mediascape continues to evolve and change the ways we receive information. Students will be encouraged to consider the quality and veracity of the information they deal with and will be taught to engage critically and evaluatively with the material and ideas by considering contextual ideas of bias and persuasion. This is an important tool to prepare them for the modern age of disinformation and ‘fake news’. For the content of the unit, students will be considering representations of topical issues, which gives the unit a sense of reality. Students will be looking at the importance of communicating our own opinions in a clear and fair way and will have the opportunity to produce their own non-fiction output around the theme of ‘News’. They will practise reading skills, looking at how a writer has conveyed a perspective by using inference and then analysing the writer’s methods. The unit is topical in content and so lends itself well to speaking and listening activities in the form of debate. The unit is further developed in year 8 where students will look specifically at those language techniques associated with rhetoric in a non-fiction unit which deals with speeches.
-Introduction to short stories.
(‘A Christmas Carol’ or other short story)
Throughout KS3, students will be interacting with short stories. In year 7, they are introduced to the short story through the short form novel ‘A Christmas Carol’. The choice of text is suggested and ultimately is the choice of the class teacher based upon the interests and needs of the students. In this unit, students will engage with elements of the writer’s craft in areas which correspond to the other prose unit, that is they will be looking at plot, characterisation, structure, themes, and close reading of language. Using a 19th century text will develop the students’ confidence with the style and language of an unfamiliar era. Students will be working on developing their vocabularies and syntax in their own creative writing. They will apply reading skills by considering how the writer’s choices impact the understanding of the reader. In addition, students will be exploring the complex ideas associated with the context of the text, for instance, in the case of Dickens, considering ideas about contemporary and historical attitudes towards poverty and charity. The text provides an ethical framework for students to discuss, allowing them to use speaking and listening skills. Students will be expected to make lateral connections between the world depicted in the short story and the world they themselves inhabit. In year 8, this unit is further developed by looking at a series of short stories which have themes relatable to modern life.
-Introduction to World Literature.
(Mythologies)
In year 7, students will be introduced to world literature by looking a mythologies, primarily those of classical Greece and Rome. Students will be encouraged to develop a curiosity and exploratory mindset which will be vital to their overall understanding of literature and world cultures. Students will be reading and exploring the exciting worlds created through mythologies, considering aspects of morality and ethics alongside literary concepts, such as stock-characters, heroes and villains, and ideas prevalent in Greek drama, such as hamartia, hubris, catastrophe, tragedy, catharsis, and peripeteia. Students will be introduced to speaking and listening skills as they consider the oral nature of mythologies and will learn how to craft their own characters and conflict in their creative writing as they experiment with creating aspects of their own mythologies. Students will be introduced to understanding a narrative from a literary perspective, considering how mythologies are used to deliver a didactic moral and will be linking this to their own understanding of the modern world, evaluating these moral lessons in the light of their own times. This unit is further developed in year 8 by looking at world literature through the lens of travel writing. This allows them to make similar enquiries about other cultures and the ways they are presented.