Oliver Twist Lesson: 'I Want Some More'

A lesson (could be two lessons, depending on the amount of time spent annotating the extract and the agegroup) based around Charles Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’ and focusing on the workhouse / gruel scene. Students are given a glossary of difficult words, brief context about workhouses and the Poor Laws, visual stimuli and encouragement to think about what the inadequate food in a workhouse would do to a person. They are then encouraged to annotate the extract and use it for their own creative writing in which they utilise Dickens’ techniques.

Would suit KS3 or KS4 - at KS4 level this could easily be adapted to suit Edexcel Language Paper 1 practise or AQA work on an unseen 19th C text.