Literacy week and World Book Week resources focus on: Extreme Reading Extreme Writing Genre Triptych Display Boards

A resource for running an after school club to promote mindfulness. The activity focuses on a Sanskrit chant.

First week’s lessons.

Student Knowledge Booklet

Year 10: Perspective is the position from which we observe situations, objects, facts, ideas and opinions. Perspective may be associated with individuals, groups, cultures or disciplines. Different perspectives often lead to multiple representations and interpretations. MYP key concept: Perspective. Related concept: Point of view Summaries of the Staves. Drill questions. Four extended writing points. Modelled writing. Original copy of the text.

A lesson study of short story writing displayed in the English classroom.

Year 9 Winter Term Newspapers MYP English Language and Literature Is it true, you are what you read? Although there have been distinct changes to journalism with the shift to online newspapers, newspapers use layout and content to portray a news story. Newspapers are a powerful means of mass communication and for centuries audiences have turned to them to express and reflect their own point of view, personal beliefs and cultural values. Personal and cultural expression: Analysis and argument, fields and disciplines

Play script

A single lesson to explore the concept of culture with reference to Adorno and Horkheimer to develop thinking skills and prepare students for reflective writing.

PowerPoints on the first five chapters. These lessons support the Knowledge Booklet and can be adapted. The lessons are structured around the IB DP Language and Literature English course - Intertextuality.

Students wrote a letter to Siegfried Sasson from Wilfred Owen after studying Exposure. I applied a filter to each photograph I took of students’ letters to age them. I made barbed wire from kitchen foil and cut out poppies for the corners to engage attention. I wrote up a paragraph about what the unit is about and why students are developing their creative writing.

I wrote this rap to support understanding of structure, character and characterisation, and context.

A PPT lesson to develop skills in preparation for an assessment on: Do newspapers matter in the digital age? This is an MYP lesson which you could adapt.

Narrative structures can be used to show moral and ethical dilemmas, with people’s responses to these revealing aspects of their character and identity. What do our moral and ethical choices reveal about us? Many of us have learned to become sensitive to the physical environment but fewer of us are sensitive to the moral and ethical environment. This is the surrounding climate about how to live. You will find out about morals and ethics by reading texts that explore environmental anxieties. You will learn how writers create a moral imperative. Your skills will be focused on analysis and evaluation. You will be expected to identify and apply subject terms correctly. You will have two Summative Assessment Tasks and one Formative Assessment Task in the unit which are written below. Your teacher will use the ‘AREs/End Points’ to assess your learning throughout the unit.

Why are we learning this? As the French say, the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. In studying the letter you will reflect on the extent to which people permanently change their views about political and social issues, especially in the face of literally earth-shaking world events. Immediately after the terror murders in Paris in January 2015 at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher market Hypercacher, the historian Jeffrey Herf, wrote this in his blog: “I remember well that in the few months following the 9/11 American intellectual world, especially that if liberals and left-leaning people, was in a state of welcome confusion. The familiar denunciations of American “imperialism” and the habits of sympathy for “national liberation movements” that had emerged in the protest against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s did not fit the realities of September 11, 2002…Sadly, the new thinking did not last long, or rather, it was supplanted by experts who told stories about a ”moderate” Muslim Brotherhood and about the need to avoid inflaming Muslims with public discussions of Islamism. Many decades of investment in the cultural capital of conventional habits of left and right were proving too powerful to overcome.” The idea that when we read a work of literature we are seeking to find a meaning which lies inside the work seems completely common-sense. Literary texts possess meaning; readers extract that meaning from them. We call the process of extracting meaning from texts reading or interpretation. Despite their apparent obviousness, such ideas have been radically challenged in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of reading between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.

Why are we learning this? You will learn about the Area of Exploration – Intertextuality. This is not a literary or rhetorical device, but rather a fact about literary texts – the fact that they are all intimately interconnected. This applies to all texts: novels, works of philosophy, newspaper articles, films, songs, paintings, etc. To meet the IB’s assessment criteria, you will practice evaluating and interpreting the connections between texts. Significantly, The English Patient (1992) is considered as a postmodern novel since the text is manipulated to pass on spread identities of different characters through narrative shifts, intertextuality and mini narratives. In other words, The English Patient is a model of intertextuality. For example, Kipling’s Kim, Herodotus’ Gyges and Candaules Scene, The Last of the Mohicans, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Daphne de Maurer’s Rebecca, and Caravaggio’s painting of David and more.

What is the city but the people? Our perspective of urbanisation has struggled to understand environmental and economic sustainability and its impact on the interconnectedness between humankind. Orientation in time and space: Migration Contents Page What are we learning and why? 3 Vocabulary 4-6 Lesson 1: Explore how Jane Austen structured sentiment about the virtue of the country and the vice of the city in Pride and Prejudice. 7-8 Lesson 2: Explore how Salman Rushdie structures sentiments about the colonial shadows in Midnight’s Children. 9 Lesson 3: Explore how Vikram Seth structures sentiments about the colonial shadows in A Suitable Boy. 10 Lesson 4: Explore how Hanif Kureishi structures sentiments about migration in The Buddha of Suburbia. 11 Lesson 5: Explore how Rachel Cusk structures sentiments about urbanisation in Outline.12-13 Lesson 6: Explore how country-home economies are promoted on social media platforms.14-15 Lesson 7: Explore how country-home economies are promoted on social media platforms.16 Lesson 8: Analyse how writers structure feelings towards country and city in their writing. 17 Lesson 9: Evaluate how attitudes towards migration have change. 18-19 Lesson 10: Evaluate how attitudes towards migration have changed. 20

In this Knowledge Booklet, I’ve focused on meeting the needs of students in my year 8 class - predominantly Korean students. The format of the Knowledge Booklet follows MYP English Language and Literature.

Powerpoints to support the student knowledge booklet. Lesson 6-10 The summaries are wordy but the assessments are meaningful!