Unseen Poetry

This resource covers fifteen poets in order to support students and their poetry skills (Angelou, Auden, Blake, Cope, Frost, Hannah, Hardy, Harrison, Keats, Owen, Parker, Patten, Rossetti, Shapcott, Sheers,). As you can see the poets are varied and from different time periods. The resource is made up of 15 complete/full lesson plans and all of them are accompanied with PowerPoint presentations; the poems relevant to that lesson; background to the author; resources, suggested homework tasks; and differentiation opportunities. The resource also contains top tips for the exam/example essays.

The aim of this resource:
Ultimately, this resource is meant for English teachers to save on their planning and resource making time – they can literally pick up the resource and teach it to their GCSE class verbatim. Of course, the resource can simply be used for lesson ideas and edited accordingly, for example, the teacher may want to teach a different poem for that particular poet but they can still utilise the lesson and resource ideas. Likewise the resources can be edited accordingly. The lessons also are stand alone and therefore the order of the teaching can be to the teacher’s preference rather than the order given here; they are simply split into three logical groups here.

The resource is aimed at higher level students. Nonetheless the resource could still be used for lowered ability students at key stage 4 - I have offered some differentiation opportunities to help the weaker students as well as stretch and challenge the more able. The scheme was written with GCSE in mind however, it could be utilised for a high ability KS3 class. Obviously poems can be interchanged as appropriate.

There is a noticeable theme between the resources – for example the Power Points generally take the same shape: introducing objectives, looking at the background of the poet, looking at the poem and then introducing tasks. However, in the same breath, I have tried to make the scheme as varied as possible and I have included different ways of approaching poetry and teaching poetry. As an English teacher myself, I am only too aware of the danger of monotony when teaching a large string of poetry.

The benefits of the resource:
• Complete lesson plans.
• Each lesson has a complementary PowerPoint.
• Readymade resources.
• Differentiated resources.
• Teacher copies/answers
• Model answers are included with annotations to highlight where an examiner might give marks.
• Example exam style questions for students to try
• Mark schemes
• Top tips for handling unseen poetry
• 174 pages of planning/information/resources
• Gives the opportunity for students to experience 15 different writers and over 45 different poems.