As part of my daughter’s KS3 English we have selected a few different English units from the Twinkl website which we are / have been working through. Before Christmas we worked through the Fiction Writing Unit which we both thought was useful and interesting so I thought I would share a bit about it.

Very Briefly Twinkl have split there KS3 English into three major categories – Reading, Writing and Speaking and Listening. Now I must confess when I first started using their KS3 English section I found these categories a bit confusing as I would often end up looking in the wrong area for certain resources. But after a bit of time I figured out where everything was. Most of what we have used is under the Reading section in the subsection English Literature (this really is a gold mine and well worth going through). But we have also downloaded a few of the writing units – we really enjoyed the Sunflower poetry unit and we are planning on working through the Woddunit Writing unit after half term (we are starting the English Literary Heritage Unit of Work in in a few days).

Okay so the Fictional Writing Unit. We chose this because we hoped it would extend some of our current writing knowledge and give us ideas on how to improve our creative stories (which I do feel like it did). The whole unit is split into 10 lessons – you can choose to do every lesson or you could just select the lessons you feel are relevant. We chose to try every lesson and we did them one at a time over roughly 4 weeks which actually work out quite well in terms of time management (I think trying to do more than 1 lesson at a time would have been a bit much).

The lessons are split into the following

• Openings
• Characters
• Character Types
• Settings
• Story Structure
• Language Structure
• Inspiration
• Adding Detail
• Conclusions
• Assessment

For each lesson they include a lesson plan (think of it as a guide), some activities and where relevant model answers.

One of the things I really liked about this unit is they often gave examples using well-know classic literature – I loved this. In all of the lessons I thought the activities included were well structured and well-thought out. It was not a case of completing a page and then you wonder – how does this link in? (I get very frustrated when that happens).

I liked the ideas they included in the openings, writing about characters, describing your settings, the structure, the fact that they suggest taking your inspiration from real-life, the detail, the wrapping up. I actually think I liked something from each and every lesson and felt like there was something extra that my daughter gained from every lesson.

I do think working through this unit has helped to improve her writing and has actually reinvigorated my approach to creative writing (I keep saying things like – “think of all your senses, or how many character types have you included, are you staying in the setting”).