A Christmas Carol full teaching GCSE unit

This is a fully resourced Scheme of Work for the teaching of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ at GCSE. It is tried and tested and has been taught with excellent outcomes over the past ten years. It is specifically tailored for the AQA GCSE, but can be adapted for any exam board or even just used as a nice scheme of learning for lower down the school.

Example lessons 1 and 2B are avaliable to download for free so you can see the type of resources you will be purchasing. I also have a number of the lessons/ resources avaliable under the title ‘A Christmas Carol’ as paid for, stand-alone, lessons should you wish to only purchase a few things.

I also have a separate workbook avaliable that pupils can use for 15 mintues a day to analyse language and significant moments in the text- preview avaliable in my shop.

There is a total of 24 lessons in this SOW and each lesson has a powerpoint to download and often there are accompanying worksheets/ tasks. The SOW covers analysis of a passage as well as how to respond to the longer, developed essay titles. Tasks are not all GCSE response focussed (in order to engage pupils) and there are a variety of activities such as: persuasive letter writing; debating; hot-seating of characters; obituary writing, descriptive tasks and the making of class paperchains (based on Marley’s chains of purgatory) to decorate your classroom for the festive season!

Each lesson has a starter activity for the pupils to begin as they enter the room and, if you click on the Christmas tree on the first slide of every lesson, it will link you to a christmas song on youtube that you can play whilst they complete the activity/ enter and settle down to learn. Be warned, this leads to much singing, dancing and general merriment on everyone’s part!

I have also included a cloze exercise (word doc) for each stave as a starter/ plenary or revision activity (with answers) for you to use with your classes.

The complete scheme includes:
Lesson 1- Historical context/ A03
Lesson 2- Characters and attitudes towards Christmas
Lesson 2B- The characterisation of Scrooge.
Lesson 3- Vocabulary and glossary
Lesson 4- Analysing a passage
Lesson 5+6-Writing to describe - copying Dickens’ style (used as a creative writing assessment)
Lesson 7- feedback
Lesson 8- Marley’s Ghost
Lesson 9- The Chains of purgatory
Lesson 10,11+12- The Ghost of Christmas Past
Lesson 13- Stave two character discussion and debate.
Lesson 14- The Ghost of Christmas Present
Lesson 15- Empathy/ sympathy, social reform and the cratchitts
Lesson 16-Tiny Tim biography
Lesson 17-Changing impressions
Lesson 18- Ignorance and Want- Dickens’ message
Lesson 19- Contrast
Lesson 20- The Cratchitts revisited
Lesson 21- The Spirits
Lesson 22- The end of it
Lesson 23- Past paper questions and essay planning