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Year 7 Outsiders: Project One: Homeless People |
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How do homeless people feel? Task One Try your hardest to imagine you are homeless. You have nowhere to go and nothing to eat.
Task Two Read text 1 below, an extract from ‘Stone Cold’ by Robert Swindells. Link gives a vivid description of what it is like to be homeless.
Task Three Use the internet to help you research some of the facts and figures you will need and then design a fact sheet about homeless people. You could include:
You should use your ICT skills to present your fact sheet as best you can. Think about your font choice, size and colour, use of bold, underling and italics as well as any text boxes or borders you use. Task Four Find an image of a homeless people- try www.google.co.uk and select images then type in homelessness into the search bar. For one of the images you will need to answer each of the questions below- use your imagination!
Task Five Choose one of the following 3 written tasks to complete. Write a letter to Link (from ‘Stone Cold’) offering him advice on how to try and find a way out of being homeless. Remember USE ICE in your writing.
Your letter should be at least 300 words long and be set out as a letter with your address and the date in the right hand corner. OR Write an article for a local newspaper or magazine that persuades people to think about the problems that homeless people face and how they must feel. Remember FEARRRS in your writing.
Your article should be 300 words long and should look like an article. This means it needs a headline, paragraphs, 1 or 2 pictures and be written in columns. OR Write a diary entry which describes one day in the life of a homeless person. Your entry should be around 300 words long and should include:
You may want to look back at the work you have produced so far to give you some ideas and adventurous sounding words to use. Task Six Prepare your project to present to your English teacher. Check your spellings, punctuation and paragraphs or ask Mum or Dad really nicely if they will do it for you! Make sure your work is typed in font size 12 or 14 and is a font type that can be easily read- Times New Roman, Ariel, Comic Sans & Century Gothic are our favourites! Print out your work and put it into a plastic wallet if you have one- otherwise try not to crumple it up in your bag! Hand in your work and give yourself a pat on the back for all your hard work!
Text One: Extract from ‘Stone Cold’ by Robert Swindells The last days of January were a swine. I nearly went back to Vince and my Mum. I mean it. It snowed every day so the pavements were thick with slush and nothing gets inside a pair of trousers like slush can. Ginger and I lurked in subways and doorways as much as we could but our feet were constantly wet and freezing just the same. Night after night, frost turned the slush to grey iron and crept into our damp bedding to stiffen footwear and make sleep impossible. And if you think it’s bound to make the punters more generous with their change, seeing kids wet and shivering, forget it. It had the opposite effect. Everybody slogged grimly by and their hands never left their pockets unless they were wearing gloves. Nobody stopped. Maybe they thought they’d die if they stopped, like explorers at the South Pole. We grew hungry. Really hungry. The cold seems to settle in your bones when there’s nothing in your stomach. You can’t shift it. We tried everything-stamping our feet, running on the spot, blowing into our hands, huddling together in the subway. It was no use. All we could do was keep moving through sleepless nights and days that merged into one another till we no longer knew what day it was or whether it was morning or evening. One time Ginger borrowed a marker pen from an old newsvendor and printed couple of placards that read NON-ALCOHOLIC HOMELESS, PLEASE HELP. He said you had to put non-alcoholic because people seldom give to winos. We sat in a subway somewhere with out feet and legs in our sleeping bags and the placards on the muddy tiles but he may as well have put EVIL BABY-KICKER AFTER YOUR DOSH for all the good it did us. We stood raw on our feet for hours outside various hostels, but there were always hundreds of kids and we never got a bed. I started hallucinating. For hours at a stretch I thought I was back on Captain Hook’s hulk. In lucid moments I’d have given my right arm to be there, but I knew that Captain hook wasn’t interested in right arms. Once we’d been turned away from a hostel, we’d make our way up to King’s Cross or St Pancras, mostly- to wait for the Sally Army. The walk would keep us from hypothermia, and the Sally Army came round about midnight with sandwiches and soup and that’s what kept us alive till February came, and the thaw February wasn’t a heat wave, either, but it stayed above freezing most of the time and we kept our feet dry. Tapping got a bit easier too. Not easy, but easier. I imagined I was becoming streetwise but I should’ve known better. I should’ve realized it was being with Ginger that was making things easy for me but I didn’t not until the day I am going to tell you about. The day Ginger vanished. · Vince is Link’s new step dad · Ginger is Link’s only friend · Punters are customers- in this case people walking past · Winos are alcoholics · Captain Hook’s Hulk is a canal boat where homeless people can spend the night for £5 · Sally Army is the Salvation Army who give out soup and tea to homeless people. · Tapping is begging
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