Autobiography: Lesson on an extract from 'I Capture the Castle' by Dodie Smith

In this lesson students are asked to explore how the narrator introduces her home and family. It would ideal to use as part of a KS3 unit on autobiography.

The lesson starts by asking students to ‘think, pair, share’ about what a narrative voice is and how stories may be told. There is a slide with explains the different points of view. There is a group task for students to do after reading the extract where they are given 4 questions on the board and a challenge task. All questions are linked to the GCSE reading skills AO1, 2, 3 where they have to think about language, structure and the readers’ reactions.

There are slides with the text on for teachers to annotate on a smart board.

The plenary asks students to write a paragraph describing their home and family in an interesting way using the key descriptive skills.

This lesson, as my other Literature lessons do, includes:

Starter tasks which introduce the main idea of the lesson
Handouts of extracts/text
Differentiated tasks
Opportunities for pair and group talk within activities (‘Talk for Writing’)