English Narrative Writing Lesson - Building Suspense - Teaching PowerPoint with Activities!

This resource includes everything you need to teach children grades 3 to 6 how to write fantastic narrative stories filled with suspense, drama and excitement. The resource is a PowerPoint presentation lesson complete with:

√ Learning objective
√ Success criteria
√ Starter and plenary activities
√ Review of relevant prior learning
√ Teaching input/ information slides
√ Examples of good character descriptions & feature identification tasks
√ Speaking, reading, writing and grammar tasks
√ Explanations and examples of how to use each structural and language feature in your own character descriptions
√ Differentiated consolidation tasks (3 levels)
√ Whole class, paired, group and independent activities
√ Feature checklists
√ Writing inspiration

Learning Objective:
To build up suspense and drama in narrative writing

Success Criteria:
I can explain what suspense is and where we might find it in a story.
I can read and understand a suspense-filled text.
I can identify techniques used by author’s to build suspense.
I can write my own suspense-filled part of a story.
I can write in the past tense.
I can check my work against a feature checklist.

Lesson details:

• Starter activity - Quick creative writing task
• Review of revelant prior learning - differentiated (3 levels) grammar task focusing on writing in the past tense, as is typically used when telling stories.
• Review of revelant prior learning - story hills, typical structure of a narrative story + consolidation activity
• Teaching input addressing the following: What is suspense? Where/ when is it found in a story? Why do authors use suspense? How do we build up suspense in our writing?
• Mini-plenary reviewing teaching input
• Listening task - listening to part of a story that is full of suspense
• Speaking task - retelling the part of the story
• Whole class/ teamwork activity - creating a mind-map of potential problems to describe with suspense in a story
• Teaching input/ explanation + consolidation task for each of the following features of suspense:
  - Short, snappy sentences
  - Creepy atmosphere
  - Empty words
  - Show- not- tell
  - Rhetorical questions
  - Dramatic openers
  - Dramatic punctuation (ellipses, exclamation marks etc.)
  - Cliffhanger
• Whole class writing task (model/ shared write)
• Independent writing task
• Differentiated feature checklist for each ability level (3 levels)
• Plenary - review list of features and techniques for building suspense

PLEASE NOTE - Please look at the ‘notes’ section of the PowerPoint for additional information about each slide. These include teaching tips, ideas and further explanations.

This lesson is also suitable for being delivered remotely through online learning with some slight adaptations. It could combine very well with platforms such as Pear Deck and Nearpod.