This is my attempt to engage and develop my Year 12s academic voices in their Paris Anthology related essay responses. The main issue my class had seemed to focus upon when and where to start. What I do is show them how they can place a particular emphasis on one of several potential areas of focus initially. I show them how they could use Mode, Audience, Purpose, each of Grice’s Maxims and each of the different levels of language as a starting point for an analytical response. The attached word document appears to be an “essay”.It isn’t. It’s the collected starting points placed in one document so that the students can focus more on the “how you do it” instead of trying to copy down the best bits. It worked reasonably well and is suited for a class with similar needs. Hope you find this useful.

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.

A deconstruction of the English Language Paper 1 examination that uses Brighton Rock as a source. I’ve lifted the model material from the mark schemes and there’s FAR related targets included. Essentially, this is a lesson that can be taught either AFTER the students have sat the exam and you want them to peer/self assess, or you could change it so that that they answer a question and then mark their efforts. The Section B element is a bit of an experiment - peer marking creative writing is always a challenge. So I’ve given the students a series of yes/not/some related questions. The idea is that they “tick” the level next to the answer on a copy of the AO5 and AO6 mark schemes. Using that, they should be better able to work out where the creative writing fits. My peer marked creative writing has got much more accurate as a result of this.

A PowerPoint designed to be used after students have sat the Section A of the AQA English Language Paper 1 for June 2019. It wouldn’t take much altering to be used as a mock exam itself. The slides are set up to show the model answers from the mark scheme so that students can peer/self assess and give actions and feedback.