Night Time KS4 Writing Journey
This short writing journey is intended for use at Key Stage 4, although it can profitably be adapted for Key Stage 3. At KS4, planning for writing can be limited due to pressure on curriculum time and students’ main regular experience of writing can be through exam-style task practice. The units in this series of writing journey planning for KS4 are intended to support improvements in students’ writing through explicit teaching and the use of rich textual extracts as both stimulus for ideas and models for writing.
The focus for this series of KS4 writing journeys is on structural and cohesive features of texts and the adaptation of sentence structures for effect. These elements have been identified as being key to success in writing at GCSE, as well as being noted areas for improvement for many students.
Each of the KS4 writing journeys planned has a loose thematic link to the majority of the key texts specified for GCSE English Literature, meaning that these units can be integrated into planning linked to a literature text, either at a key moment in the text or once study has been completed. They can also be used as a bridging unit between two or more literature texts or adapted as stand-alone units in preparation for narrative/descriptive writing at GCSE.
In this writing journey, the stimulus text is the opening chapter from Erin Morgenstern’s novel, The Night Circus (Doubleday, 2011), entitled Anticipation. This extract is freely available online, eg here. The motif of night-time is a common feature of a number of the texts across the range of GCSE English Literature specifications; pupils are invited to explore the differing ways that night-time can be used symbolically and to write a narrative that takes place at night.