After completing an activity, this provides you

with the opportunity to either assess your own

work or another student’s work.
This contains questions that ask you to look
back at what you have covered and reflect on
your learning.
This list summarises the important skills that
you have learnt in the session.
These questions look back at
some of the content you learnt
in each session in this unit. If
you can answer these, you are
ready to move on to the next
unit.
At the end of each unit, there
is a group project that you can
carry out with other students.
This will involve using some of
the knowledge that you
developed during the unit.
Your project might involve
creating or producing
something, or you might all
solve a problem together.
How to use this book
Self-assessment
If you can, make a recording of your drama and listen to it.
• Is it likely to interest your audience?
• Did you vary your voices?
• Did you speak clearly?
• Write a paragraph in your notebook giving an account of
your strengths and also areas to develop.
• What have you learnt from writing this monologue?
• What might you do differently next time?
Summary checklist
I can explain how a writer might use a character to develop
a theme.
I can analyse how a writer presents a heroic character.
I can write an analysis of how a character is presented.
Check your progress
Answer the following questions to check what you have learnt in this unit.
1 What are the key features of adventure stories? Give some examples of events that
happen in adventure stories.
2 What type of characters do you fi nd in adventure stories? What happens to them?
3 List three ways you can keep an audience interested when relating an anecdote.
4 Using examples, explain what alliteration and sibilance are.
5 List three ways of creating suspense in a story.
6 Explain what you have learnt about planning, writing and redrafting your writing.
Write a list of tips for future students about improving writing.
5 List three ways that a writer can create suspense.
Project
6 Explain what you know about writing accounts of adventures.
How has your writing improved?
This unit has explored the life stories of real people and characters in
literature. You
are going to research and present the life story of a person in public life who has
made a difference. This might be a scientist who has made an important medical
discovery, a person who has promoted peace or a young person who is trying to
improve the planet like Greta Thunberg.
Think carefully about the person you choose to research. There are many people
who have done good things, so it might be more interesting to choose someone
who is less well known. Start by researching the person. Find out about
their life story and the positive things they have done.
Present your research in the form of a booklet to show in class.
You should present information in an appealing way. Use pictures,
coloured text boxes and headings to organise your material.
Once everyone has completed their booklet, spend time in
groups reading each other’s work. You should discuss each
person in turn. Be prepared to justify to your group
why your person is the most signifi cant.
At the end of your discussion, your group must
choose one person (in your group) who you
think has made the most important contribution
to society. Nominate one student per group
to tell the class which person your group has
selected and why.
7
1 Adventure
In this unit, you will study texts about adventures. You will read about
characters who face challenges, go on journeys and experience exciting
situations. As you work through the texts and activities, think about the
way the characters react to their adventures.
1.1 The start of an adventure
In this session, you will:
• discuss the features of adventure stories
• look for explicit information in a text
• explore how writers structure their stories.
Getting started
Adventure stories are about characters who go on journeys. The
characters often have special skills and face difficult challenges.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, is an example of a
story about a boy who goes on a sea adventure to find hidden
treasure. In pairs, make a list of adventure stories and films that
you know.
8
1.1 The start of an adventure
1 Adventure stories are a genre. This means that different adventure
stories contain similar features. In pairs, discuss:
• the types of characters in adventure stories
• the types of settings in adventure stories
• what happens in adventure stories
• how these stories usually end.
Compare your findings with another pair. Apart from the
main character, what other types of people do you find in
adventure stories?
‘Beware Low-Flying Girls’
Read the extract from ‘Beware Low-Flying Girls’ by Katherine Rundell.
It is about Odile, a girl whose adventure begins when she discovers she
has a very unusual skill.
Key words
genre: a
particular type of
text, for example,
adventure,
comedy, crime,
science fiction
setting: the
location of where
a story takes
place
Extract 1
It was cold, that day she first took flight, and the snow lay thick enough to hide
a cat in.
She wore her father’s coat. It came down past her knees, and she had rolled the
sleeves
up, so they hung at her wrist in a great roll of wool. The coat had once been a
deep,
cocoa-bean brown, but now it was the colour of an elderly shoe. It smelt, very
slightly, of
horses and woodsmoke.
The wind was fierce that day. It was often windy in winter at the top of the
mountain;
birds got blown backwards up the cliff edge, reverse-somersaulting through the sky,
their wings shedding feathers like confetti. Seagulls blew into the house,
sometimes
right into her lap as she sat curled up in the corner, wrapped in rugs, reading by
the
firelight. Suddenly finding that you had an irate seagull as a bookmark was not,
Odile
thought, ideal, but her grandfather would throw a blanket over them and stomp out
into the night with the bird bundled into his arms.
‘Always be polite to birds,’ he would say. ‘They know more than they let on.’
The house was built into the rock of the mountain, and the door was polished stone.
Her
grandfather had lived on the mountaintop all his life. Odile had lived with him
since she
was a baby. She had nobody else. In the house, the fire burned all the year round.
‘Keep
the fire as hot as the human heart,’ said her grandfather, his jaw stern. ‘Never
let it go out.’
That day, she had pulled her father’s coat around her, and set out. The wind caught
the
coat as she walked down the mountain path, billowing it out behind her like a sail.
It had
no buttons left, so she took a corner of the coat in each fist and held her arms
stiff at her
side. She began to run, her hair blowing in her eyes and mouth, down the hill.
9
1 Adventure
The wind caught her coat and tossed her upwards. Odile felt the
sudden swoop of gravity undone.
It lasted only a second. She screamed, pulling her coat up over
her face, and dropped to the ground again, landing on
her hands and knees in the snow. Her breathing
stopped. Though she had barely fallen two feet,
she felt winded, gasping and choking for air.
‘I flew,’ she whispered. Or had she perhaps
just tripped and fallen more extravagantly than
usual? She had to be sure.
Odile rubbed some snow into her eyes to make
sure she was awake. She pulled a twig from a tree,
brushed the frost from it and used it to pin her hair
out of her eyes. She put on her gloves.
She stretched out the corners of her coat. She began to
run, downhill, her feet kicking up a spray of snow.
The coat billowed out behind her. Her breath misted
the air in front of her.
And Odile flew.
Reading tip
When you see words you do not understand, use details from
the surrounding sentences to help you work out meanings. For
example, in the second to last paragraph of the extract, you could
work out the meaning of billowed by thinking about the effect the
wind might have on Odile’s coat – blowing it out around her.
2 Practise working out word meanings from their context.
The following words are taken from the third paragraph of
the extract. What do you think they mean?
a fierce
c irate
b confetti
d bundled.
3 When reading a text, it is important to be able to identify and
understand the main points and ideas that a writer tells you.
10
Key word
context: the
situation within
which something
exists or happens
1.1 The start of an adventure
Explicit information is information that the writer states directly.
Read the text again and make notes on:
a what you can find out about Odile’s family
b what is unusual about the setting
c other unusual aspects of the story.
4 The narrative structure of a story is the order in which events take
place. This includes how a story starts, when different pieces of
information are revealed and how the story ends. Look at this
timeline, which shows the first four main points in ‘Beware Low-
Flying Girls’.
Key words
explicit
information: ideas
and details that
a writer states
directly
narrative
structure: the
order in which a
writer sets out the
events in a story
You are told Odile
can fly.
The strength of the
wind is described.
Her father’s coat
is described.
You find out that Odile’s
grandfather and Odile
live alone.
Write down the last two main points in the extract from ‘Beware
Low-Flying Girls’.
5 Writers design the narrative structure of t