A useful little unit that we put together to fill a 2/3 week gap. It has the students explore pre-1914 material - poetry and prose - and ends with a controlled assessment in the vein of the old AQA English style questions for the Literature paper. Might fill some other gaps out there in shorter half terms.

I used these lessons with year 9 classes. They still adhere to the old AQA specification (they talk of bands). But, each lesson is a complete poem and will save you some work.

A series of lessons that can easily be expanded out to around 12-13 lessons that do the following: Establish an understanding of the plot over 4 lessons Gets the students to act out the plot via story whooshes (you will need a summary of the play to do this - I use a copy of the play with summaries of each page and get the kids to read certain key parts of the dialogue out loud) Explore language and structure as methods Build on the ability to analyse extracts Develop a contextual understanding Rather pleased with these to be honest. Hopefully you guys will feel the same too. PS - I've chucked in a load more stuff too. Extract Analysis 3 was a lesson where I received "GOOD" for my observation. There is also a Creative Writing Lesson that may prove useful too.

A resource dump for my first attempt at preparing a middle set year 9 class for the rigours of the new GCSE - some success, but the class dynamic was more of a problem than the lesson resources themselves. Some editing may be required, but if you are wondering about how to approach the Section B parts of the exams, this covers a lot of bases.

5 Lessons and supporting resources that assist with the revision of this particular unit of the AQA English Literature Examination. I cover the following poems (my students identified these ones as the toughies): The Prelude Exposure Remains The Emigree Kamikaze Each poem has a revision style lesson (it assumes prior knowledge of the poem on the part of the student, but they also make good starting points if you are cracking through the poems at a fair old pace). Each poem also has a revision card attached - we use these as tools in their own right, and I will be creating one for each of the poems soon enough. The unit finishes on a GCSE style question where they have to compare Ozymandias to one of the poems they have studied. Hopefully you’ll find this useful.

An 84 page long booklet that provides you with the following: A thematic table A section for each poem where you can find a copy of the poem, a notes page (complete with helpful guidance), generic revision and exam questions and a response page A comparative table A copy of the mark criteria I have also included the documents I used to make this just in case you want to make a different version yourself. Enjoy, and be poetic. ALTERATION: I’ve updated the resource now - found one or two typos. Also, I’ve added in a grid that allows for a variety of themes to be “graded” in terms of how present a theme is: I’ve found this to be an engaging way of getting the students to compare. Finally, I’ve added a small section at the end about the different types of poetic forms.

Material I generated for the old AQA style creative writing controlled assessments - it still resonates with the new AQA Paper 1 Section B style questions (inspired by images). You'll need a copy of the film and you'll need to alter the Learning Outcomes (they are all set against the old AQA English Language Coursework criteria).

This is quite possibly, the coolest thing I've ever tried out. The premise is as follows: a debate between two students (or teams) where four referees observe. The referees score what they see and a winner is announced at the end. Now add in entrance music a la pro-wrestlers (think the Rocky Theme, We Will Rock You etc.) and run it on an open evening and I promise you this - you will have EVERY parent in at some point to see what is going on. I've run this at SIX parents evenings now and the same thing happens every time - all of the kids rock up to watch. I set it last time round where the Deputy Head took on the winner of the students (a year 9 girl). They packed the place out to see who won . The debate topic "Batman vs Superman" (serious stuff this). Needless to say, she wiped the floor with him (in a totally professional way). You'll need to be the promoter/commentator/ring side referee - this can be exhilarating and exhausting! Try it.

A collection of resources designed to support the teaching of Macbeth at GCSE level. The lessons assume that the class will be “acting” out the play, using the summary as a stimulus for the acting out element. I interspersed this acting with numerous directions to read the text aloud; overall, the students enjoyed this combination of normal language and Shakespearean. It has always been my way to establish an initial understanding of a Shakespearean text before trying to wade through the language. Hopefully, this will prove a useful starting point.

A set of resources designed to engage year 11s with English Language Paper 2 Section A. I shaped the lessons around the articles written surrounding the time of Jack the Ripper, and around an article published following the Zodiac Killer sending a letter to the San Fransisco Chronicle. The class were fascinated by these articles - I had students independently going away and reading pre-19th century newspapers off their own backs! This will need to be taught delicately though - the content is graphic in nature, so be sure that your class has the necessary level of maturity to access this material without being distracted.

A thoroughly enjoyable unit of work. Built around a work booklet and designed for that awkward half-term at the end of the year where you don’t want to give out new exercise books. The workbook contains a copy of The Norwood Builder, comprehension questions and vocabulary list, as well as a variety of activities that focus (primarily) upon creative writing skills with some language and structure based tasks. The lessons are designed to be used with the workbook. NOTE: I may upload a slightly different workbook in the future, but I will leave the original on here.

Taught as part of a two teacher approach to a top set year 9 class. I focused on developing creative writing skills, with a particular emphasis on the structural components, whilst my partner teacher focused on the more traditional literature style approach. The Woman In Black was used as the stimulus for all elements of this unit and the climax is a GCSE English Language Paper 1 style task (not included in this pack as it is part of my school’s assessment pack). Overall, I found this unit to be really useful in challenging students to think about their creative writing in more than just a reactionary way. The nature of the structure focused questions align with my belief that it is always better to teach the Language Paper 1 Q3 question in the form of a structure-focused creative writing commentary at KS3 level. Hopefully this will provide you with a useful starting point for your own creative writing journey.

Attached is a spreadsheet that does an awful lot of work for you. To summarise, it does the following: Allows for easy collation of GCSE Literature marks on a paper by paper basis AND as a whole examination Allows for easy identification of various student demagraphics - EAL, PP and so on Allows you to measure progress against students best, average and last marks across both papers Works out "how many marks" until you hit target grades for individual students Colour codes grades and marks to allow for at a glance progress checks Once you buy this spreadsheet, you will not need to get another LITERATURE spreadsheet. The document contains instructions as to how to update the spreadsheet. Oh, and if you do get this, I suggest you LOCK the individual spreadsheets ASAP: the document is set up to allow you to do this and still enter the data, you just won't be able to accidentally delete any of the coding, thus removing any brain overloads that might ensue. Happy spread-sheeting!

A complete unit of work including source poems, videos and mp3 versions of poets reading their poems. Differentiated for higher, middle and lower ability classes (each lesson back ground has a slightly different colour for an easy visual guide), this is a unit of work I designed with my Head of Key Stage 3 hat on at my last school - an entire year group was successfully taught this unit. A real success.

I designed this for the old AQA specification. Now that the spec is obsolete, some of you might be thinking of turning those stacks and stacks of anthologies into resources for KS3 classes (we certainly are for year 9). As a result, you may find this booklet useful. The booklet is essentially a copy of the entire anthology where on the left hand side of a double page spread you have the text, and on the right hand side you have space for notes. Each story is ended with generic questions and has TWO exam questions for revision purposes. Perfect for planning lessons when you are taking an extended period of time off. Happy reading.

A series of lessons designed to make sure students have a clear understanding of the “basics” and the “developed” skills and techniques required for EACH of the possible text types they could meet in Section B of the English Language Paper 2 exam. Because my lot were taught A Christmas Carol (and I was trying to kill two birds with one stone by revising this at the same time…), the tasks are all focused on writing within the world of Scrooge. To that end, they may require some editing on the part of the user - hence the reduced price.

A lesson that models the process of building a high-end An Inspector Calls essay. Please note, the lesson assumes that the class has read the play and has attempted versions of the AQA English Literature questions already. Also, the lesson works best as an aspirational example: I concentrate on using sophisticated language to shape my points, and focus on integrating appropriate references. Please note I’ve deliberately left some academic “gaps” too - this model response is a high-quality response, but there are other avenues of academic insight that can be taken. Bottom line, to get the most out of this lesson, you’ll need to spend a little time going through it all first - hence the low price.

My year 11s were STILL struggling with how to frame a method, so I came up with this stand alone lesson. The idea is that, having reviewed the slide where the methods are explicitly identified, the students will see that a method and a quotation are not the same thing. This was a successful lesson. UPDATE: I repeated this process with a bottom set year 10 class where I was even more specific. This was also a successful lesson, so I’ve included it.