10 English – Creative Writing inspired by The Outsiders – Unit Introduction

A PPT designed for use in a 10 English unit who have studied the novel The Outsiders in the previous term and now are using it as inspiration for a creative writing assignment (either a gap/silence short story or a series of journal entries from the perspective of a character other than Ponyboy).

This lesson was taught at the end of the previous term. it explains to students what their assessment will be. (Students will explore a marginalised character’s perspective in the novel). They will produce 600-800 words across three journal entries.

The lesson begins by explaining who counts as a marginalised character. In the next term they will be returning to the text they studied (SE Hinton’s The Outsiders) but for the next few lessons I used The Hunger Games as my example).

It then talks about what a journal entry is and why people use diaries / journals. Some Q’s are posed on the slide to see what students already know: What are the language features you might find in a diary? Are there any common structures associated with diary entries?

The following slide goes through some language features that are in journals.

We look at an example journal entry that one of my past students wrote (from the perspective of Peeta Mallark from The Hunger Games.) Students are to identify language features and text structures used in this example. We also discuss how Peeta has used this journal as a way to process his thoughts and feelings.

The following slides go into text structures and optional text structures. At the end of the lesson students are asked to pick a character from The Hunger Games that we will plan for together and then co-construct a series of journal entries so they understand the process.