Chapter 4, The Great Mouse Plot from 'Boy' by Roald Dahl

In this lesson students are asked to explore how Roald Dahl describes his childhood in chapter 4 of his autobiography, Boy. It would ideal to use as part of a KS3 unit.

The lesson starts by asking students to ‘think, pair, share’ about when they may have been surreptitious. They are then to read chapter 4. There is a group task for students to do after reading the chapter 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 an essay paragraph using the SQUID structure provided. There is a slide which demonstrates how students can self assess their essay writing 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’)