Charles Dickens Quotes Display for Writing

These are quotes that I highlighted while reading David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop because I wanted to use them with my Year 5 and 6 class in order to aid their writing (especially greater depth), however, everyone benefited from them. This resource would work Year 5+ including secondary. I edited only a couple of the quotes in order to highlight the areas we were learning (i.e. colons) or to make it slightly easier to process (i.e. breaking them into two sentences rather than one). Most of them are unabridged.

They are extremely useful for setting and character descriptions, as well as inner voices of characters in narratives, which increases the quality of writing immensely.

Here are a couple of examples from our class work in Y5:

(Writing a Diary Entry as Liam in the book ‘Cosmic’ – after Liam receives the phone call that invites him on a father & daughter adventure). You can see how the child adapted the quote from Charles Dickens to fit in her writing.
— When I received the phone call from Dr Drax, all the cogs in my brain started turning. New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind. This was my only opportunity to go on the greatest adventure: all the colours of my life were about the change. All I needed was a daughter! —

This one below is a narrative (flashback) as the ‘Foreigner’ in the book ‘The Island’. It is a character who is a refugee arriving at an unfamiliar island. The children were asked to describe their background/past lives using flashbacks throughout the narrative they were writing.

— My childhood wasn’t very exciting as we didn’t have as much as other people did. As a child of the poor, I knew but few pleasures: even the cheap delights of my childhood had to be bought and paid for. Since my family didn’t have much to spend on these childhood ‘delights’, I didn’t get to experience many of them. In fact, I had to sit and watch other children and their simple delights of their fortunate lives.

These are works of more able writers in my class who adapted the author’s style in their work. Many of the other children used quotes as they are in their writing, which immediately challenged their thinking as they needed to adapt their work to make it coherent.

There are 19 pages in total. There are two A4 PDF versions of the same pages: one with colour background and the other is plain.
I attached some samples in the previews.