The island - Cultural capital project

Originally used as a case study at the AQA training hubs, this creative KS3 resource prepares students for studying Lord of the Flies at GCSE. The lessons introduce them to the text Coral Island, the idea of dystopia, close text analysis using extracts from George Orwell's 1984 and tasks based on being stranded on a remote island without adults. Would also work well as a stand-alone set of lessons.

There are handouts and teaching notes to accompany a series of six PowerPoint lessons. The lesson structure is as follows:

• Lesson 1 (Slides 1–4) Imagining an uninhabited island
• Lesson 2 (Slides 5–10) The Coral Island
• Lesson 3 (Slides 11–17) Descriptive writing task
• Lesson 4 (Slides 18–22) Utopias/dystopias
• Lesson 5 (Slides 23–30) Examples of dystopias
• Lesson 6 (Slides 31–33) Creative writing redraft

The blog post explains the thinking behind the scheme and shows how this approach can enrich students' cultural capital without starting the GCSE text in KS3.