'Blue Dog': English Scheme of Work

‘Blue Dog’: English Scheme of Work is a comprehensive KS3 teaching pack for the class novel - in this case, ‘Blue Dog’ by Louis de Bernieres. It can be used for a Year 8 or Year 9 class and may be particularly successful for pupils in a rural setting. It comprises 14x 1-hour lessons in a well-presented master ppt, accompanying worksheets, and essay planning guidance. The SoW has been designed to be as versatile and engaging as possible - with research tasks, interesting video links, links to online articles, a diverse portfolio of creative tasks (mapping, letter-writing, creative writing, book reviews), oracy-enhancing discussion questions for each lesson and a chapter-by-chapter glossary of terms to help the study of the novel progress as smoothly as possible.

The novel itself is an uplifting coming-of-age story, packed with adventures in the Australian outback.

This teaching pack includes:

• A master ppt (111 well-presented slides) with 14x 1-hour lessons
• Teaching notes on ppt slides with answers to discussion questions and handy teaching tips
• 7x class worksheets including i) A vocabulary-building ‘word wall’; ii) An A3 sized ‘map’ of the novel for jotting down notes on characters, themes and novel symbols; iii) A characterisation chart for the novel’s main protagonist, Mick; iv) An example PEE grid; v) An essay planning guide; vi) Book review template. vii) open-cloze worksheet activity on Australian aboriginals. All worksheets provided in doc x and pdf format so they can be adapted.

Note to teachers: schools will need to provide pupils with copies of the novel in order to teach this SoW.