Developing Shakespeare.
(‘Julius Caesar’ or other Shakespeare)
The year 8 unit on Shakespeare develops the understanding introduced through the study of a play in year 7 by expanding upon the depth of comprehension, understanding of contextual knowledge, and analysis of writer’s methods using an unfamiliar Shakespeare play. Whilst the suggested text is ‘Julius Caesar’, which has links to the non-fiction unit on Rhetoric, the teacher has an open choice of text and is therefore able to respond to the needs and interests of their own class. In terms of reading skills, students will be dealing with more complex literary concepts and methods, studying prosody, plot and narrative, character and theme, and more in depth language analysis. Alongside whole-text understanding, students will be developing their skills with analysing extracts to support their interpretation in an increasingly sophisticated and academic style. Students will build upon their terminology relating to writer’s methods to do this. In addition, students will be exploring the content of the play in more depth, considering aspects of character and theme in a more mature and critical way. As before, the focus of this unit is to familiarise students with a challenging style of writing whilst developing their confidence decoding and comprehending a play. They will have opportunities for creative writing to consolidate their comprehension and will further develop their understanding through performance activities which further the speaking and listening skills introduced in year 7. In year 9, this unit is furthered into extension, where students will engage with a new Shakespeare play with more independence and critical depth.
Developing Journalism- Rhetoric.
This unit builds upon the learning done in year 7 in the non-fiction ‘Journalism’ topic. Students previously learned about the media and its various forms and style of writing. Students will now focus on a specific style of non-fiction writing, touched upon in the previous year’s unit, which will allow them to analyse, write, and perform persuasive writing. The art of rhetoric topic will build upon the existing linguistic understanding introduced in year 7 but will expand and develop the students’ repertoire of rhetorical devices and their uses. The speech form allows them to engage with a range of texts, historical and modern, which demonstrate the very best of human oratory skills. They will comprehend, interpret, and analyse a range of texts, applying their understanding of rhetorical figures of speech. In terms of content, this might include methods such as hyperbole, litotes, bathos/pathos, ethos, logos, antimetabole, anaphora etc. Students will also research and engage with the wider context of speeches, both political and personal, and will use their understanding of the historical, social, and biographical context to aid their analysis. This unit lends itself well to the development of speaking and listening skills introduced in year 7. Students can produce their own creative writing in the form of persuasive speeches and then perform those speeches to develop their skills. This topic culminates in year 9 with a unit on advertising, which sees students applying all of the learning from years 7 and 8 to create their own projects.
Developing short stories.
In year 7, students were introduced to a short story in the form of a novella. They were introduced to the skills necessary to understand and critically evaluate prose writing, and to adapt methods in their own creative writing. This unit in year 8 sees students developing their understanding of the forms of short prose fiction. There are a range of suggested short stories, though teachers are able to select a collection, or indeed individual stories which are topical or reflect the interests and needs of their students. The unit exposes students to an exciting and varied range of challenging texts which will fire their imaginations and whet their appetites as both readers and writers. Students will be developing reading skills by considering literary choices at a whole text level, such as the writer’s use of structure and plot, characterisation and setting, and presentation of theme. In addition, students will be drawing on the reading skills from across all units to develop their close reading skills and understanding of language. Students will be critically interpreting a writer’s choices and language and structure in the short story form, alongside commentary on aspects of the form itself. Students will develop their understanding of the modes of description and narrative which they will implement in their own short story writing. The process of writing short fiction; researching, planning, drafting, evaluating, editing, will also be developed as an extension to work completed in year 7. Students will be led to make critical comparisons of the works they have studied, independently and in class, and will have the opportunity to present these in the form of an oral report. The unit will be further extended into a more critical analysis in the year 9 topic of Gothic literature.
Developing poetry- form and structure.
Students completed an introduction to poetry in year 7, in which they learned some skills for the comprehension and initial analysis of poetry. This year 8 unit sees this learning developed by looking at a variety of new poems, applying those skills of comprehension and language analysis, with an additional focus on form and structure. The class teacher can choose their own poems or use those suggested, but forms of poetry covered may cover ballads, lyrical poetry, narrative poems, monologues, gazelles, villanelles, sonnets, haiku, limericks, alexandrines, epic poetry, eulogy, odes, blank verse, free verse, rondeaus etc. The skills of the unit will cover prosody and scansion and will see students develop their ability to comment on how these choices impact upon the meaning. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own poetry through form, rhyme and meter, and will develop speaking and listening skills by performing these aloud. Students will be encouraged to explore poetry independently and develop their own interests in style and mood, and to make comparisons and connections across poems. Though the focus of the unit is on form and structure, students will be exposed to a variety of poetry which covers different themes and ideas, and as a development of the year 7 unit, they will be expected to engage with these critically and independently applying wider poetic terminology from the previous unit. This unit leads to the year 9 World War 2 poetry topic, where students will apply all they have learned about language, form and structure but specifically dealing with poems with a shared context that will allow greater depth of analysis and comprehension.
Developing the novel.
(‘The Woman in Black’ or other Novel)
Year 7 saw students learn about a short novel. In year 8, this learning will be developed in this unit which is structured around a longer and more challenging novel. The same skills of comprehension, analysis, interpretation and evaluation apply and will be developed to a higher level of sophistication. Students will be working with the whole-text and with extracts and will build upon their bank of terminology to consider both literary and linguistic concepts introduced in year 7. The suggested novel is, ‘The Woman in Black’, though the choice of text is open to the teacher, who may vary the text to suit the interests and needs of the class. The text requires class reading alongside independent work, and allows scope for developing confidence with speaking and listening through reading aloud as a class. In terms of writing skills, students have modelled for them in the novel multiple aspects of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, sentencing, and punctuation which they can use to support their own technical development of their writing. The unit allows students to experiment with language during creative writing activities, as well as developing their understanding of how characters and situations can be utilised for a chosen effect. When applying reading skills, the class will engage with a range of literary ideas first introduced in year 7, but here they will be applying those concepts more critically and across the whole novel. To support this, the unit allows for close text reading giving depth of analysis at key points in the novel. Here, students will be able to focus more precisely on aspects of method relating to language use and semantics to consider how a writer has shaped meaning. Developing the understanding of longer prose fiction, the students will be taught to consider the text within the literary context it is produced in, consider how typical or atypical it is for its era. The students will develop their work on the novel by considering aspects of genre. This work on the novel culminates in the year 9 unit on a world literature novel.
World literature- travel writing.
In year 7, students considered world mythologies in order to broaden their understanding of world cultures and to introduce them to thinking about morals and ethics in literature. In year 8, this learning is developed by looking at travel writing from a variety of authors from a variety of time periods. The range of forms might include journals, reviews, online comments, diaries, and advertisements etc. The students will be reading and analysing the writers’ methods using non-fiction sources. Students will be encouraged to develop curiosity about the places they are studying and they will be able to bring in their own knowledge, personal or cross-curricular, to advance their understanding. The unit will consider representation of peoples and places and look at the way writers present this information. They will consider the writers’ perspectives and how those perspectives have been conveyed through choices of language and structures. They will be developing their abilities to compare and contrast perspectives and make connections across texts and contexts. This will require them to apply laterally the methods they have studied in other units, fiction and non. Students will be using the skills and concepts introduced in Journalism and Rhetoric units as a basis to analyse the writers’ choices. Students might learn to evaluate a writer’s of word functions, figurative language, the semantic connotations of diction, and the structure of accounts. They will have the opportunity to develop their own descriptive writing, nonfictive or fictive, about places and other cultures. They will be developing their vocabularies and use of figurative writing to convey a sense of place and mood, using the reading texts as stimulus. For speaking and listening, they may be presenting on their location of choice in the form of a travel review. This unit ties together learning about the non-fiction mode of writing alongside learning about world literature and so leads to the extension of learning in the year 9 units ‘Advertising’ and ‘World Literature’.