Flash Fiction Lesson 1 – What is Flash Fiction? Exploring genre and character Learning objectives: • To start developing an understanding of what Flash Fiction is. • To develop thinking about genre and character. • To examine how writers structure and organize texts. Resources: Student booklets (‘The Dragon’ by Angie Sage), sequencing copies of ‘The Dragon’, cut up into 11 sections/ paragraphs Starter: • Present students with the opening paragraph of ‘The Dragon’ on the whiteboard. Ask them to come up with some questions they may have as a result of reading these two sentences. See if they can base their questions around the 5 Ws, for example: • Who is Talmar? • When is this story set? • Where is this happening? • Why does Besiegers have a capital ‘B’? • What ‘would not be long now’? • Discuss some possible answers to the questions students come up with as a class. Then ask them to consider what genre of story is suggested by these two sentences and to make a list of the typical features of that genre. Based on these ideas, what do students think might happen in the rest of this story? Development: • Tell students that they are now going to be given the remaining parts of the story and that their task is to put it in an order that makes sense. • Put students into groups and give each group the remaining 10 sections/paragraphs of the story. When the groups have done this, ask them to explain their choices to the rest of the class. • Then, read the story (as written by Angie Sage), together as a whole group. • Elicit students’ general response to the story first, for example: Did they enjoy it? Why or why not? What did they find interesting about it? • To explore their understanding of the story further, students could then begin to examine character in more detail. Consider projecting some of the questions below onto the whiteboard and asking students to create a mind map of Talmar: • Who do you think Talmar is? • What do we know about the situation she is in? • What do we know about her family? • What are her feelings/emotions in the story? • Why might she be afraid of enclosed spaces? Plenary: • Put the phrase ‘Flash Fiction’ on the whiteboard and ask students what this means, thinking about what they have just read. • Now show students the definition from page 3 of the student booklet and ask them to consider how ‘The Dragon’ fits that definition. Flash Fiction Lesson 2 – Understanding and exploring plot Learning objectives: • To develop understanding of plot. • To make critical comparisons across texts. Resources: Student booklet (‘Chocolate’ by Kevin Crossley-Holland and ‘Making Friends’ by Chris Higgins), Key Elements of Plot worksheet Starter: • Put the term ‘Urban Myth’ on the whiteboard and ask students what they think this means. Support their thinking with a definition if necessary. • Ask students to share some they have heard. Development: • Now reveal to students that the title of the short story they are going to read is ‘Chocolate’ and tell them that the writer came up with the idea for the story after hearing an urban myth. • Show students the opening two paragraphs of the story on the whiteboard (up to and including the sentence ‘You know, two birds with one stone’) and ask them to make some predictions about what might happen next. They could share ideas in pairs to begin with and then as a whole group. • Then read the whole story through as a class. Elicit students’ general response to begin with. Ask the question, what is it that makes this story sound like an urban myth? • Then ask students to consider how the writer structures the story in order to build the tension and humour. • Following this discussion, ask more specifically what they think the key elements of plot are in a piece of Flash Fiction. They could also refer back to ‘The Dragon’. • Then give students a copy of the Key Elements of Plot worksheet and ask them to identify the specific parts of the story that demonstrate the key parts of the plot. Discuss the effects of the writer’s use of language/style at these points as a class and add further notes to the table in the resource. Plenary: • Ask students to compare all the stories they have read so far in terms of the plot. You could ask, or project on the whiteboard, some of the following questions: • Which has the most effective opening and why? • How far into each story does the conflict occur? • Which story has the most tension/greatest climax? • Do all of the stories have a satisfactory resolution? If not, why not? Extension: • Ask students to read ‘Making Friends’ by Chris Higgins (a story which is also based on something which might not seem very believable). • They could then use the Key Elements of Plot worksheet to make notes on how the writer structures the plot in this story. Flash Fiction Lesson 3 – Exploring different styles Learning objectives: • To develop an understanding of different styles/forms of Flash Fiction. • To develop role-play and drama techniques, considering the impact of tone of voice, pitch, pace, facial expressions and body gestures. Resources: Student booklets (‘Something to Tell You’ by Aidan Chambers and ‘My Problem is I Don’t Know When to Stop’ by Morris Gleitzman) Starter: • Present students with the phrase ‘There’s something I have to tell you’. You could show it on the whiteboard from the start of the lesson and leave students to wonder what it is in order to develop their curiosity. • Then tell students that they are going to role-play/improvise a conversation in pairs. Person A will begin with the phrase ‘There’s something I have to tell you’ and person B has to jump to conclusions about what it is going to be. Person A should try to show how they get increasingly frustrated as the conversation goes on due to the fact that person B is not really listening to them. • When students have had a go at this, ask for some volunteers to perform their conversation in front of the class and discuss. Development: • Present pairs of students with ‘Something to Tell You’ by Aidan Chambers. Before reading, ask students what they notice about the style/form of the story on the page (i.e. that it is told through lines of dialogue alone). • Each pair should then read through the story with one person reading Ben’s lines and the other Nat’s. You might also ask students to consider the following before reading: use of voice, facial expressions and body gestures. • When students have read it with each other, ask them for their general response to the story. Thinking back to the previous lesson, you could also ask students to consider how the story is structured with regards to the Key Elements of Plot worksheet. Students could look in particular at how the story uses conflict, climax, and resolution. • Students could then have a go at reading the story ‘My Problem is I Don’t Know When to Stop’ out loud to each other. • When students have had a chance to read it through once, ask them to develop a reading/performance of the story which considers such things as the pace, pitch and tone of the characters’ voices at different points in the story. They could annotate where and how this should happen on the story itself. Plenary: • Ask some students to perform their readings in front of the class and for audience members to reflect and comment on the different meanings created by each performance. You could record some performances too for students to self-evaluate. Flash Fiction Lesson 4 – Exploring setting Learning objectives: • To develop an understanding of the writer’s use of setting and its effects. Resources: Students booklets (‘Flower of the Fern’ by Jan Pienkowski and ‘Routine’ by Calum Kerr), Exploring Setting worksheet Starter: • Present students with the titles of the two stories, ‘Flower of the Fern’ and ‘Routine’, and ask them to make predictions about what the settings of the two stories might be. Students could produce a mind map or a bullet-pointed list of ideas/images. • Encourage students to also think back to Lesson 1 where they discussed genre. What genre of story is suggested by the titles and how does this support their thinking about setting? If flowers and ferns suggest a woodland setting, for example, what type of story might we expect to see in this place? Feedback and discuss as a whole group. Development: • Read ‘Flower of the Fern’ together as a class and elicit students’ initial responses to the story. • Now ask them to think specifically about how the writer presents the setting and what the effects of this are. Present them with a definition of setting (i.e. the historical moment in time and the geographical location of a story). Then ask students to highlight words in the text that are related to the setting (eg midsummer night, forest clearing, dark woods, river, bank, heart of the forest, howl of wolves, etc.). • They could then make notes on the effects of these language choices in the table on the Exploring Setting worksheet. • Then read ‘Routine’ together as a class and discuss students’ initial response to the story. • Ask students to consider how the writer uses setting in this story and to what effect. They could do a similar task to the one above, highlighting language that relates to the setting (perhaps including some of the props that help indicate where the action is taking place).