Exploring diverse voices in literature: building evaluation skills
KS3-4 students explore the opening section of Yasmin Rahman's young adult novel, All the Things We Never Said, published in 2019. The extract deals with mental health themes and Islamic faith.
This teaching resource helps students to develop evaluation, quotation selection and analytical skills when responding to an unseen literary text.
There are two carefully scaffolded tasks to build students' confidence. The first task encourages students to consider whether they agree with statements about the text and to choose appropriate quotations, with an optional paragraph writing extension activity.
The second task helps students to make analytical notes on key characters and themes in the extract, before writing their own evaluation of the extract.
This resource is designed to introduce students to diverse writers and characters, as part of our Diversity in literature collection.
An extract from the teaching resource:
This is the opening of a novel, so it focuses on introducing characters and key ideas.
Who are the characters? What are their relationships to each other? How are key ideas introduced? Fill in the table to explain what we as readers learn in this section of the text.
|
|
Ideas from the text |
Key quotes |
Techniques |
|
Mehreen |
The novel reveals the troubled thoughts and distressed emotions of the narrator. |
‘…it soothes me…— for a while, anyway’ |
Punctuation (ellipsis and use of dashes) suggests characters’ intimate thoughts (like a stream of consciousness). |
