A lesson to engage students in creative writing, and to enable them to create effective similes using sophisticated adjectives. Students develop their understanding of similes and identify their effects, utilising their knowledge to construct their own simile poem.

A sheet listing opening sentences/paragraphs from a range of novels, which can be used/adapted for all secondary year groups. I’d suggest laminating it, so that it can be reused. Could be used to explore inference skills and the writer’s intent, sentence structure, word choice, and to identify literary techniques. You could also use these as sentence scaffolds for exploring both structure and content with students, as suggested by Jane Considine in her first The Write Stuff session on demonstration writing.