KS3 Gothic and Supernatural Writing

Captivate your KS3 students with this rich, immersive creative writing unit exploring the Gothic and Supernatural!

This fully resourced 20-lesson scheme of work is designed to develop students’ descriptive and narrative writing while building their confidence with literary techniques and atmospheric writing.

Perfect for Year 8 or mixed-ability KS3 classes, this unit blends engaging extracts, scaffolded skills practice, and creative freedom – culminating in a final assessment task with planning support and success criteria.

What’s Included:

20 fully resourced, editable PowerPoint lessons (approx. 1 hour each)

Carefully chosen extracts from Gothic and supernatural fiction

Differentiated activities and sentence scaffolds

Recap quizzes and retrieval activities

A blend of narrative and descriptive writing tasks

A structured final assessment task (AQA-style: choice of narrative or descriptive)

Planning templates, model paragraphs, checklists, peer/self-assessment tools

Success criteria and extension activities to stretch higher-attaining students

Student-friendly explanations of key techniques in British English

Skills Developed:

Alliteration, personification, pathetic fallacy, sentence variety

Juxtaposition, characterisation, setting construction

Similes, metaphors (tenor/vehicle/ground model)

Building suspense and supernatural atmosphere

Structuring and crafting original narratives

Editing, reviewing and self-assessing work