Year 7 Poetry Anthology

This resource is aimed at year 7 with the intention of building familiarity and a foundation for poetry and other skills that will be required to flourish at GCSE. Here you will find a complete unit (ten lessons). The main premise is that students get used to having an anthology whereby they study a selection of poems and begin to compare the ideas and techniques of the different poets provided. This will help to build skills for comparing poetry but is also geared initially to secure confidence in dealing with unseen poetry. For variety, there are other tasks included which are beneficial for other GCSE skills such as creative writing and the non-fiction language paper. The resource is written with AQA GCSE in mind (exams starting 2017) however the scheme is fully viable for all exam boards. The resources you will find is a full programme of study, PowerPoints for every lesson, worksheets and the anthology itself which includes background information on the poets, as well as the poems themselves (or, due to copyright reasons, the location of poems online).

The scheme covers five poems (William Blake/The Tyger, Alfred Lord Tennyson/The Eagle, Lewis Carroll/The Crocodile, Roald Dahl/The Pig, and Edwin Morgan /Hyena) allowing students to experience poetry from the C19th and C20th. Each lesson is accompanied by a PowerPoint mapping the lesson for both teachers and students, step by step. The PowerPoints include all of the information documented in the programme of study; this means that the lesson is instantly ready to go. The scheme is also fully resourced with accompanying worksheets and some useful website links where appropriate. Each lesson also has homework ideas, many of them have various options. Although the homework fits with the learning agenda of the lesson, they are not essential to the continuation of lessons and therefore homework can be selected as regularly as is appropriate for your timescales, homework policy and ability of students. I know that many schools operate with a homework timetable and therefore, as there are optional homeworks for every lesson, the scheme should be able to complement these timetables and school needs.

The unit culminates into a final assessment whereby the students write a comparative essay. There are various written tasks throughout though that could be manipulated into assessments, should your department/school demand a greater number of assessment points.

I have endeavoured to make the resource as varied as possible in order to engage, differentiate and target a number of skills. The resource includes class discussion, group work, paired work, individual work, creative writing, analytical writing and, of course, poetry investigation. I have also included as much self/peer marking as possible in the hope that this eases the teacher workload. Of course, no one size fits all and I hope at least you can adapt this resource to inspire your students.