Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
Explain to students that Macbeth is going to write a letter to Lady Macbeth explaining the decision he’s arrived at. He should either persuade Lady Macbeth to give up on her ideas, or concede that Lady Macbeth might have a point, and he wants to go through with it. This could be written up in full as a writing assessment.
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Readers want to consume the news as quickly as possible; they don’t want to excavate nuggets of meaning from mountains of words. The news needs to be written clearly, concisely and correctly – THE 3 BIG C’s.
Illustrate with the following:
Write on the board ‘FRESH FISH SOLD HERE’
The fishmonger had a sign which said ‘FRESH FISH SOLD HERE’. The fishmonger had a friend who persuaded him to rub out the word FRESH – because naturally he wouldn’t expect to sell fish that wasn’t fresh; to rub out the word HERE – because naturally he’s selling it here, in the shop; to rub out the word SOLD – because naturally he isn’t giving it away. And finally to rub out the word FRESH – because you can smell it a mile off.
Using the same principle, you can ask students which words they could remove and why.
Explain that vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a machine has no unnecessary parts. This doesn’t mean that the writer should make every sentence short, or avoid all detail. It just means that every word should TELL.
Issue Wasteful Words sheet. Discuss the example; check understanding. Students to complete the sheet by giving the sentences a good butchering. Students to to try to make the sentences crisper, shorter and more to the point. The underlined words indicate where wasteful words are being used.
After activity, ask students to complete the following sentence in their book.
Writers have to be economical with language when writing the news because…
This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Show the PPT and discuss students' responses to the three questions.
Discuss Roald Dahl's quotation, and the short story features on slide 3.
Show slide 4 and issue Baby Shoes handout. Explain to students that this is a short story, just one sentence. Students are to read the ‘short story’ and think about the story behind it, e.g. Has a married couple lost a baby?
Encourage students to think a little more left-field, like is 'Baby Shoes, Never Worn' the name of a painting?
Students should jot down their ideas around the ‘short story’. They may discuss their ideas with a partner.
Introduce Ernest Hemingway. Students are to copy down notes into their exercise book.
Ask students to think of a collective name they would give to stories that are six words long, e.g. ‘sentence stories’. Encourage students to be inventive. They may discuss in pairs. Show slide 4; these are different names given to the shortest of short stories - are the ones students suggested up there?
Split students into seven groups. Give each group one piece of Flash Fiction stuck to a piece of A4 paper. As a group, they must decide the ‘story’ behind each piece of flash fiction. Model activity. Rotate the flash fiction allowing different groups to make notes on the same sheet of paper. Encourage students to think outside the box and not to go straight for the obvious.
After 10-15 minutes, make sure each group has one piece of flash fiction. Each group should read their flash fiction aloud and explain their story behind it. Students who are not presenting should listen, as they will be randomly selected to pick and explain their favourite piece of flash fiction.
(Optional) Issue question cards. Ask students to see whether the 'short story features' discussed earlier apply to the six-word stories.
As a final activity, students should have a go at writing their own 6-word short story. Share with the class.
Issue Question Cards
Grid for students to use to analyse and record their own day of talking, considering the participants, the purpose, the content etc. A grid is also included for students to analyse their parents' day of talking.
In this resource bundle are three activities to learn the language features on a magazine's front cover:
CARD SORT - cut out all of the cards and ask students to match up the feature with the example.
FEATURE DOMINOES - students essentially play a spoken version of dominoes in which they match up language features with examples. Detailed instructions included on resource..
BLOCKBUSTERS - students have the cross the square on the PPT vertically or horizontally by asking a series of questions about magazine language features.
MAGAZINE LAYOUT - students learn how a magazine is laid out. Firstly, put students in pairs. One partner spends 1-2 minutes studying the magazine layout before they have to turn over the sheet and try to explain to their partner how a magazine is laid out.
Students learn the following features:
Alliteration
Emotive language
Tag line
Left side third
Cover line
Imperative
Superlative
Sky line
Pun
Masthead
Second person pronoun
Interrogative
Hyperbole
Central image
Use of numbers
Connotation
Students are asked to analyse a short piece of dialogue between a teacher and student. They are to 'zoom' in on the language and focusing specifically on words, e.g. the difference between the words 'chat' and 'discussion'.
Print off the slides in the PowerPoint and issue them to pairs or groups. Students are to analyse and annotate the opening lines with their ideas about what makes them effective and what makes them draw the reader in.
GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS:
Narrative stance
Semantic field
Prosodic features
Syntax
Paralinguistic features
Idiolect
Figurative language
Imperative
Graphology
End-stopped line
Interrogative
Enjambment
Phonology
Pun
Colloquialism
Connotation
Dialect
Discourse structure
Genre
Lexis
Idiom
INSTRUCTIONS FOR ACTIVITY:
Cut out these dominoes and laminate them (optional). Give individuals or pairs one domino, including you, the teacher.
You begin by reading out the definition on the yellow side of your card. The student who has the term on the blue side of their card that matches with your definition then puts up their hand and says their term out loud. They then read aloud the definition on the yellow side of their card. All class members will have to listen carefully to see if their term matches with the definition they’ve just heard, and so the game continues until it goes full circle, every student has spoken, and you eventually hear the definition that matches with the term on the blue side of your card.
Essentially, you’re playing a large game of dominoes, where students have to match key terms with definitions they hear. Depending on your group’s knowledge/ability, you may work altogether to match up the terms with definitions, or, alternatively, you may decide to play this as an actual dominoes game on the floor.
This is a great 10-minute starter that really helps students to remember key terms and their definitions.
This is a resource to coincide with a unit of worked based on teaching the history of the English language. It is a dictionary for Lincolnshire Dialect. There is a lot of scope with this resource, e.g students could find out different versions of the word in alternate dialect. Or, alternatively, students write a play script in Lincolnshire Dialect - often with hilarious consequences, and mostly including farmers. Students then perform their plays which could become a speaking and listening assessment.
This is a glossary of terms / features of spoken language. This is far from an exhaustive ‘list’ – just some basic terms that you should be familiar with for analysis of spoken language data. It's organised in alphabetical order. It can be used as a guide for students to annotate and identify features in spoken language date.
Example of resource:
Accent: the ways in which words are pronounced. Accent can vary according to the region or social class of a speaker.
Adjacency pairs: parallel expressions used across the boundaries of individual speaking turns. They are usually ritualistic and formulaic socially. For example: ‘How are you?’/ ’Fine thanks’
Back-channel features: words, phrases and non-verbal utterances [e.g. ‘I see’, ‘oh’, ‘uh huh’, ‘really’] used by a listener to give feedback to a speaker that the message is being followed and understood.
Blend word: words that are formed by combining parts of other words – e.g. jeans + leggings = jeggings.
This is a fun, engaging starter which gets students excited about writing.
Firstly, they watch the McCain Wedges advert before completing a guided writing activity where students write from the perspective of an inanimate object with question prompts. This often has hilarious results. The final activity offers student complete creative freedom, but please note, googly eyes are required.
Students sometimes use the word ‘of’ where they should use the world ‘have’. This may be because the shortened version of ‘have’ sounds like ‘of’.
Students learn about the common error as described above, before correcting sentences.
Fun little starter to get students thinking. They're asked to look at 8 different objects and try to group them into pairs and explain their reasons why. Students can work individually, in a pair or in a group depending on their ability.
Students are asked to write a short paragraph about their weekend using three connectives from the list displayed in the PPT. Students are then asked to share their paragraph before reflecting on how connectives help to improve their writing.
Spelling activity based on unstressed vowels. Students learn what unstressed vowels are before trying to come up with tricks to remember spellings with unstressed vowels.
Place these facts around the room. Students have five minutes to search for the facts in the room and write them down. Allow time to feed back and discuss afterwards.
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Before the lesson display the difference words/phrases used to describe Macbeth 'Rise and Fall of Macbeth'.
Students are to walk round the room and pick one phrase written on white paper and one phrase written on grey paper. They should jot these down in their exercise books.
Once they’ve done that. Ask students to think carefully about the ‘grey paper’ phrase. They should think about how they say it. Instruct students to walk around the room and say it to whoever they meet.
Feedback – Ask students how they said it? In what tone? Why?
Do the same again but for the ‘white paper’ phrases.
Feedback – Ask students how they said it? In what tone? Why?
Explain to students that these are all phrases used to describe Macbeth throughout the play. What does this suggest about the character of Macbeth?
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Will Christopher get to London?
Christopher is about to face a situation that will be very difficult for him. How will he cope? Will he manage to get to London?
In this resource students are asked to consider how Christopher's Asperger's Syndrome will affect his experience at the train station. They're to consider challenges he'll face and strategies he'll use to cope. This will take students 10-15 minutes to complete. Using either thumbs-up, thumbs-down or thumbs in the middle, vote as a class for whether Christopher will cope at the train station or not.
This resource is taken from my KS3 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time SOW which you can buy from my shop.