A complete Year 7 Gothic unit: 23 editable lessons on Poe, Dickens, Stoker and Stevenson, building to a creative writing assessment, plus a knowledge organiser.

Immerse your students in candlelit corridors, crumbling mansions and unreliable narrators. This scheme takes Year 7 from “What is the Gothic?” to confidently writing their own atmospheric Gothic fiction, with every lesson built around a clear enquiry question.

What’s included

• 23 editable PowerPoint lessons, each with a retrieval starter, Word of the Lesson, modelled annotation, structured tasks and an exit ticket
• Resource booklet with all the extracts in one place, including Frankenstein, The Tell-Tale Heart, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula and Dickens
• Knowledge organiser covering context, key features, language methods and key vocabulary
• Additional tasks menu with writing, creative, research, analytical and challenge tasks for early finishers or homework
• Wider reading list of classic and modern Gothic texts suitable for Year 7
• Assessment lessons: deliberate practice, a feedback lesson, assessment preparation and a final creative writing assessment with mark scheme and support sheet

Lesson journey

1. What defines the Gothic genre?
2. How does setting create fear?
3. How can weather mirror emotion?
4. Using Gothic conventions in my own writing
5. How does Poe build psychological tension?
6. Duality in Jekyll and Hyde
7. Writing as an unreliable narrator
8. Symbolism and fear
   9–10. Deliberate practice and feedback
9. How Dickens makes the ordinary frightening
10. Claustrophobia in Dracula
11. Blurring reality and the supernatural
    14–19. Crafting Gothic writing: structure, hooks, showing fear without naming it, sentences that mirror emotion, ambitious vocabulary, and putting it all together
    20–21. Assessment preparation and assessment
    22–23. Flexible teacher-choice lessons

Skills covered: inference, language and structural analysis, pathetic fallacy, symbolism, narrative perspective, sentence craft and descriptive and narrative writing.

Fully editable, so you can adapt it to your classes. Ideal for a half-term Year 7 unit, and it also works well as a KS3 Gothic writing unit.