Year 8 – Summer Term (second half) Non Fiction
This half term, Year 8 students will be completing a non-fiction module in their English lessons. The focus will be biography and autobiography.
This will involve:
Reading a range of pieces of biography and autobiography
Writing their own biographies and autobiographies
Interviewing a range of people
What you can do at home:
Help students to find copies of biographies of famous people they are interested in.
Prompt students when they are trying to focus on their own memories. Talk to them about things they did when they were young and which they might not remember and remind them of significant or interesting moments in their lives. Read the resulting written work and help them to improve it.
Encourage them when they need to conduct interviews. Be available for interviewing yourself, and help them to meet up with appropriate “subjects”.
Students will be expected to read some biographical work, but reading a whole biography of a famous person can extend this focus. In class, fairly short pieces of biography and autobiography will be written and redrafted for National Curriculum coursework. Some students really enjoy this form of writing, however, and they can be encouraged to write more extended pieces at home.
Every half term English students will be asked to complete a compulsory homework task on the computer, either at home or at school, and then email their work to their English teacher.
This half term students will be asked to do some research on the internet. They will need to produce a list of web sites about a famous person and give them a short review or rating. Further details can be found on the homework page.