GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS: 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 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.

Two lessons that teach students all about Shakespeare's sonnets, their structure, rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter. Packed with interactive activities, including lots of drumming with hands on the desk! The learning objectives are as follows: WALT: identify the structure and rhyme scheme of a sonnet. WALT: explore another of Shakespeare’s sonnets to take inspiration from to write my own. These two lessons lead students up to writing their own sonnet as a writing assessment.

L.O. To identify and understand emotive language, and its effect on readers. The PowerPoint begins by asking students to look at two different headlines at a time and to decide which one is most emotive, and why. They then focus on two particular headlines and translate their ideas to paper by writing a PEE paragraph. In the next activity, they then have a go at editing a series of headlines by replacing words with more emotive words. Students should share ideas as an entire class. Students then look at a newspaper article and underline/highlight the emotive words. They then complete a table whereby they think about 'more emotive' and 'less emotive' words than the ones in the article. As a final activity, or as homework, students answer the following question about the newspaper article in PEE paragraphs: How does the writer’s choice of emotive language make us (the readers) feel about the dog and its previous owners?

This lesson takes students through Vernon Scannell's poem A Case of Murder. First, students are presented with the First Two Lines from their poem. Place these are students desks before they enter. They're to think about the poem and what it could be about. Next, present students with Gap-fill Poem where they are urged to fill in the gaps in the poem. This helps them to engage with the content and really think about the language of the poem. Feedback. Issue the complete poem. Discuss initial thoughts. Go through the activities in the PPT, which includes quick questions, in-depth question, discussion on themes, emotional response and then a contextual-based homework.

Starter: Be active, not passive! Display PowerPoint. Go through slides 1-3. Explain to students the difference between active and passive voice. Teach students the idea of bringing the subject to the front of the sentence in order to transmit meaning more clearly, directly and succinctly. In this lesson students are going to put together a whole article individually or in pairs (depending on your group’s ability). Ideally, this should be done on laptops, but it’s possible to do on paper. You are going to feed students pieces of information via the PPT. Students will use the information to put their article together. Laptops are better for this activity as they are able to edit previously written paragraphs more efficiently. For lower ability students, it’s probably best to print off the slides. Explain task using slide 4. Show students slide 5-11, leaving about 5 minutes between each slide. For slide 10, you’ll need to print copies of the Article for pairs. In the last five minutes, instruct students to check through their work using slide 12. Students to swap their laptop with another pair and compare articles. Show students Original Article. This is the actual article based on the same information published in 2008. This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.

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.

Students are issued with a scenario and asked to represent/show the story from the perspective of any of the people numbered 1-9. They must consider their perspective carefully. Ask themselves what can they see and hear? Write a short account; write in as much detail as your perspective allows. This activity is a hands-on way of finding out how narrative perspective can alter the narration of a story. This will lend itself well to leading into a discussion about a narrator's point of view and reliability of narrators.

This PPT offers students two activities to practise close reading and inference. The first activity gives students a scenario in which they have to consider whether the protagonist is guilty of theft. The answer isn't very obvious so students have to closely read the passage to make a considered decision. The second activity gives an RSPCA's description of a puppy for adoption. Students have to explain what they can infer from the passage based on evidence and reasoning.

Print off enough of these sheets to ensure you have one skill per student or group. When students are rehearing for a performance, hand students or groups one skill each. They have to focus on improving that skill in their rehearsals. You may swap the skills to ensure students are focusing on more than one skill.

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.

The Laboratory by Robert Browning - Annotated Poem on PowerPoint

The idea of this exercise is to show students how a writing-to-describe question can be answered in a clever and interesting way. The question being 'Describe an average day at school', and the answer being given from the perspective of a pair of scissors.

Looking at both tragic and comic features, students decide whether Act 4, Scene 1 of Much Ado About Nothing conforms more to a tragedy or a comedy. Students find evidence for each feature before making a decision. This could lead into some effective class discussion and debate. Students are asked to consider the phrase 'tragicomedy'.

Issue 'Poem Analysis' and tell students that they're going to analyse a poem (cue students' inevitable groan). The 'poem' is really the lyrics from Eminem's and Rhianna's Love the Way you Lie, but DO NOT tell students this. Allow students to analyse the 'poem'. They're to: Underline the word/phrase you and your partner really like (you can do one each) What is this poem about? How do you know? What makes this a poem? Underline and label things that make this a poem. Discuss after students have had 10 minutes to analyse the poem and annotate it. Without saying anything, just play the beginning of Eminem's and Rhianna's song and watch students' faces. They'll be amazed and suddenly quite engaged with poetry which they thought they hated. Lead into a discussion about how musical lyrics are a form of poetry. As an extension task, you could ask students to bring in their favourite musical lyrics and analyse them like a 'poem'. A similar activity I've created is in my shop called: KS3 Poetry Starter - Engaging Students Who 'HATE' Shakespeare - Shakespeare or Singer QUIZ

Students need to be in two teams. A volunteer from each team must come to the front. Volunteers must answer a series of questions to try cross the square vertically or horizontally. They’re allowed to ask for help from their team twice. They’re only allowed to choose one person to answer the question. This resource includes a PowerPoint and a series of 18 questions with answers. Example of three questions below: F – How do you spell Frankenstein? C – Who is Frankenstein’s friend? Walton I – In which city does Frankenstein live? Ingolstadt

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.

Set up a debate with your class as a speaking & listening assessment/activity to run alongside the reading of David Almond's Skellig. This debate springs from the character Mina, who is home schooled. Having done this debate several times with classes, it usually elicits some passionate opinions. Divide your class as necessary into two teams - 'for home schooling' and 'against home schooling' and then issue the cards to the opposing teams. The cards will give students starting points to develop their arguments further. This is a flexible activity to manage and adapt however you wish to suit the abilities of your students.

A fun, accessible resource for students to revise the key tips for questions 1-4 in Section A of the AQA Non-fiction Higher paper.

Ask your students to graph the build-up of tension in each act. Differentiation would include asking students to add quotes to their graph or illustrate pictures to help their understanding.

A printable classroom aid for students to use to remember the necessary language skills for writing to describe - SIMPLES, with each letter standing for a different language skill. I used this with my GCSE classes and it proved really helpful for the writing section of the AQA non-fiction exam - the meerkat helped!