KS3 Horror Narrative Writing Scheme / Unit of Work - Year 7, 8 or 9

This is a fully resourced and ready to teach unit of work. It focuses on explicitly teaching SPaG to improve students overall writing skills, but also teaches students the conventions of short story writing.

Extracts from ‘The Woman in Black’ novel and film are used as models and to stimulate writing. The short horror stories ‘Click-Clack the Rattlebag’, ‘Night at the Cottage’ and ‘The Open Window’ are used to explore the conventions of short story writing and more specifically horror writing.

Contains:
Powerpoints with a range of exercises and activities
Work sheets and lesson resources
Models and extracts of writing
Mark scheme to assess ‘good writing’
Assessments
DIRT (Directed Improvement and Reflection Time) sheets
Self and Peer Marking exercises

Part 1 (Lessons 1 to 7): The Woman in Black

The unit begins with building a shared understanding of the horror genre. Then in lessons 2 to 6 the key components of good writing (vocabulary choice, techniques, sentence types, sentence structure and punctuation) are explicitly taught. Extracts from the novel and film ‘The Woman in Black’ are used to stimulate writing and practice the key skills. In lesson 7 the students redraft their work from the previous lessons to produce an extended piece of writing based on a scene from The Woman in Black.

You should read the two short stories Night at the Cottage and The Open Window before lesson 8. They can be read at any point during between lessons 1 to 7.

Part 2 (Lessons 8 to 14):

In the second half of the scheme students will plan and write a full short horror story. Lesson 8 explores the short story Click Clack the Rattlebag. In the subsequent lessons students plan a short horror story and are taught how to begin a story, how to write effective characters, how to build tension and finally how to effectively end a short story. For the final assessment students write an original short horror story.