Journeys – year 9 curriculum pack

Last updated: 15/11/2023
Contributor: Richard Durant
Journeys cover
Main Subject
Key stage
Resource type
Teaching pack

This journey-themed KS3 teaching pack aims to increase students’ confidence in tackling unseen and/or challenging texts, introducing the narrative voice and improving their critical reading skills.

The pack comprises an anthology of poems and excerpts from non-fiction and fiction texts from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries along with engaging lesson plans and practical resources.

‘I think teachers will be delighted by the balance between the flexibility of being able to dip in and choose, coupled with some suggested structures to help teachers make those choices coherent. I also think teachers will appreciate the active and imaginative approaches to texts. Collaborative exploration and the development of thinking skills are designed into the suggested approaches. Overall, I'm proud of these materials, and I hope colleagues find them useful and stimulating.’

Richard Durant, writer

Challenge your year 9 students and bridge the gap between KS3 and GCSE.

What's included?

  • an assessment objective map
  • lesson plans and ideas along with 19 tailor-made resources
  • critical reading and comprehension tasks, integrated SPaG work and a final assessment task
  • an anthology of text excerpts and poems from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

What's inside?

Introduction (page 7)

Route through week 1: First steps (pages 8-20)

  • An introduction to the ‘Journeys’ unit
  • Work based on The Wanderer by Sharon Creech
  • Work based on ‘Modestine, the donkey’ excerpt (from Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson)
  • Work based on ‘Preparing for a Long Voyage in a Small Boat’
  • Resources week 1
    • Image sheet for ‘The journey of life’ starter activity
    • Quotations about journeys
    • Formal versus informal
    • Understanding unusual words

Route through week 2: Fellow travellers (pages 21-36)

  • Work based on ‘The Train Carriage’ from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
  • Work based on ‘Taming the donkey’ from Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson)
  • Work based on ‘Oliver meets Jack Dawkins’ from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
  • Resources week 2
    • ‘Travels with a Donkey’ missing words
    • Character impressions — reflect and evaluate
    • Who the Dawkins is he? Thought tracking

Route through week 3: Exploring and discovering (pages 37-49)

  • Work based on the ‘monsters’ images
  • Work based on ‘Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole’
  • Work based on ‘A perfect night’ (from Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson)
  • Work based on ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou
  • Resources week 3
    • Week 3 quotations
    • A perfect night … comprehension questions
    • ‘Still I Rise’ — group work tasks

Route through week 4: Choices (pages 50-64)

  • Work based on ‘The further adventures of Toad’ from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  • Work based on ‘The life story of a Polish sweatshop girl’ from The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves
  • Work based on ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost
  • Resources week 4
    • What they actually said...
    • Describing a scene
    • Freedom to choose? – ‘The life story of a Polish sweatshop girl’

Route through week 5: Pausing (pages 65-73)

  • Work based on Once by Morris Gleitzman
  • Work based on ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas
  • Work based on ‘Leisure’ by W. H. Davies
  • Resources week 5
    • Chapter sixteen – the opening
    • Introducing ‘Adlestrop’
    • Plenty of care

Route through week 6: Arriving and going on (pages 74-81)

  • Work based on ‘Taking a Short Cut’ by Mary H. Kingsley and the ‘The Jungle Husband’ by Stevie Smith
  • Work based on ‘Dorothy Conlon’s final journey to ‘the other side’’
  • Work based on ‘Crossing the Bar’ by Alfred Tennyson
  • Resources week 6
    • Ordering the text
    • No last word
    • Which word is right?

This sample is an example of suggested plenary activities for week two of the Journeys curriculum pack:

1. Watch and review. 

Share the dramatic presentations and invite students to critique each other’s versions.

Creative extension.  Tell students to write a narrative about an incident or a meeting on a journey.  They could make this up, or they could write about something that has actually happened to them.

This could give students the opportunity to draw on techniques they have studied in the three texts they have read.  Those techniques might include:

  • dialogue
  • dialect
  • careful word choice for effect.

Alternatively, students could write a continuation of one of the three texts they have read.

2. Reader-writer groups. 

Before students begin their own writing, you could set up ‘reader-writer’ trios.  These trios will read each other’s writing at prescribed intervals (e.g. every half hour) and give helpful feedback that includes comments on how well they are using their chosen technique(s).  The trios’ first task could be to meet and help each other to decide on a journey incident that they are going to write about: they could each tell their partners about something that has happened to them on a journey, and answer their partner’s questions about the incident.

Journeys – year 9 curriculum pack
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All reviews

Have you used this resource?

5

01/04/2021

5

03/02/2021

Stimulating materials. Kept my and my students' interest. We enjoyed comparing texts & finding the underlying meanings of the different people's journeys. Good range of language , writing styles and genres .

Eve Procopakis

18/12/2020

looking forward to going through this interesting resource with my students. Thank you So much.

Loubna Razine

19/05/2020

5

01/04/2021

5

03/02/2021

Stimulating materials. Kept my and my students' interest. We enjoyed comparing texts & finding the underlying meanings of the different people's journeys. Good range of language , writing styles and genres .

Eve Procopakis

18/12/2020

looking forward to going through this interesting resource with my students. Thank you So much.

Loubna Razine

19/05/2020

So looking forward to starting this pack with my Skype students. Thank you so much!

Valerie Long

07/05/2020

Thank you.

DJ S

29/04/2020

5

29/04/2020

Very good. Great for my year 9 students.

Zindy Macheol

27/04/2020

5

29/03/2020

5

08/01/2020