Writing about Emotions!

This highly engaging and informative double lesson (around 1.5 to 2 hours of teaching materials) helps build students’ ability at using varied and imaginative techniques to describe emotions in their creative writing. Specifically, students learn how to create in-depth paragraphs detailing the emotional state of their narrator and characters, both implicitly and explicitly.

I wrote this lesson because I noticed that there are an extremely high volume of students that approach creative writing tasks (even in their GCSEs) offering little depth or detail in terms of their characters emotions. Even though they have clearly learnt a number of writing techniques from their teachers, their emotional writing often merely explicitly states how a character feels, using the same four or five emotions.

In this lesson, students learn:
- To define what emotions are;
- To understand and use the vast range of emotional vocabulary and synonyms available in the English language;
- To investigate different emotions, including how they can manifest themselves;
- To understand how emotions can be communicated utilising a range of descriptive devices;
- To create an imaginative and emotionally-driven piece of creative writing;
- To self-assess their creative writing attempts;

Included are all worksheets, and detailed and visual PowerPoint presentation, which explains each concept clearly, and a lesson plan for teacher guidance.