GCSE English - P1Q5 - Creative Writing Using TWO Pictures (Stretch & Challenge)

Context: Paper 1 Question 5 is the creative writing questions where learners may be asked to write a description or narrative suggested by a picture. This lesson makes a great ‘stretch and challenge’ activity.

This lesson will work for classes of up to 30 students (more if you make two copies of the pictures). However, once you have printed off the two sets of pictures, this can be used again and again. As there are 30 pictures in each set, there are 900 possible responses to this creative writing task!

Students know by now that this question ordinarily has a ‘picture option’. They have used pictures as stimulus for creative writing before but this is in danger of becoming a little humdrum. This lesson aims to put a little excitement back in to this by giving students a choice of 30 pictures – this is known as “Picture A”. These are all pictures of people. They then get to choose between numbers 1-30 for “Picture B” which is an object (and animal, occasionally). The students must then create a response to both pictures – following these instructions.

You will be given (or you will choose) TWO pictures, labelled A and B – each has a number up to 30.
All the ‘A’ pictures are of people.
All the ‘B’ pictures are of objects (and the occasional animal!)
Your job is to come up with an inventive and interesting narrative that connects
the images:
• from the beginning
Or
• in exactly six moves
Good luck!

I have also included a spreadsheet in to which you can type your students’ names. This will make it much easier for you to track who has chosen which picture - and so on!

Aims

• To stretch and challenge the learners’ ability to create a descriptive text which covers a number of the skills descriptors needed for a high-level response.
• Revisit a number of structural and language features of texts, when and how they are used.
• To promote discussion about structural and language features and the effects that they can achieve in a text. To increase the confidence of the learners when specifically using this subject terminology.

**Assessment Objective: **
AO5: Communicate clearly, effectively and imaginatively, selecting and adapting tone, style and register for different forms, purposes and audiences. Organise information and ideas, using structural and grammatical features to support coherence and cohesion of texts
AO6: Candidates must use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation.

All pictures used are ethically sourced using a Creative Commons license. No copyright worries for you!