Presentation: Introduction to Prose Fiction which allows students to see a variety of texts spanning 400 years and opportunities to talk about how prose fiction has developed.

Hand to pairs of students, envelopes containing slips of paper with a named author and novel title. Ask the students to discuss the chronological order in which they should be placed.

Timeline support document

Work through the presentation and guide students towards making a timeline - they should pick 2 novels from a 50-year period to focus on, as well as any historical events they know about.

Exploring 'Tom Jones'.

Characters and their descriptions - ask the students to match up each name with the description.

Discuss traditional uses of symbolic names in early literature.

Read aloud the Tom Jones extracts, discussing any difficult vocabulary within it.

Ask the students to create a spider diagram for each of the characters - Tom, Sophia, Blifil, Allworthy, Square, Thwackum, Western - and consider what we learn about them from this incident .. focusing on

• their actions in this scene
• their personality traits
• their attitudes towards the other characters, what they say and what they do
• how the reader responds to them