Character and setting in Dracula + linked creative writing task

In this resource, I aim to develop my students’ analytical skills. We begin by revising parts of speech and synonyms for ‘shows’ before moving on to analysing famous opening lines to novels. We then move on to looking at famous opening paragraphs - trying to unpack what we can learn about character, perspective and setting.

The next aspect involves close analysis of extracts from Dracula in which we look at how setting is established, and evaluate it, before we then zoom in on the characterisation of Dracula.

There is a fun task involving analysing the movie version of meeting Dracula and discussing changes/additions, and what these add to our understanding of character (e.g. in Coppola’s interpretation, Dracula is wearing a blood red cloak, rather than being all in black).

Finally, we have a creative writing task: it is really focused so that pupils concentrate on developing setting and character, rather than getting lost in narrative and plot. They need to describe Harker’s approach to the castle and how he meets Dracula and enters the castle. I have given detailed prompts, a vocabulary list, and sentence types to use. My KS3 set is EAL and SEN, which is why I’ve really scaffolded this task and ensured that the tasks elsehwere in the pack are accessible to all abilities.