Students get into pairs. One partner must face the board, the other partner must face the back wall. The partner facing the board must try to describe the poetic device without actually saying what it is. The partner must guess what that poetic device is before their facing partner can move onto the next word. Students then swap places to swap roles. This starter activity lasts approximately 10 minutes. Students, especially boys, enjoy the competitive element. I've also enclosed a poetic device glossary which you may wish to hand out to students before or after the activity, depending on your group's ability, to recap some of the poetic devices.

This is a resource to coincide with a unit of worked based on teaching the history of the English language. It is a dictionary for Lincolnshire Dialect. There is a lot of scope with this resource, e.g students could find out different versions of the word in alternate dialect. Or, alternatively, students write a play script in Lincolnshire Dialect - often with hilarious consequences, and mostly including farmers. Students then perform their plays which could become a speaking and listening assessment.

Issue 'Shakespeare Prologue' to pairs. Students work through the prologue as if they are detectives deciphering a piece of evidence. They must 'zoom in' on individual words, decipher their meaning and try piece together what the entire prologue actually means and what is going to happen in the play. Allow students 20 minutes to do this before discussing the prologue and finally handing them 'Prologue Explained' which is the prologue translated into modern English. Albeit simple, students love the detective element to this activity. It really helps to engage them.

Go through the PowerPoint slide showing statements about Shakespeare. Students move to the left or right of the room depending on whether they think the statement is true or false. Once students have made their decision, click the mouse and show the answer. Use the Teacher's Notes to give students a little bit more information about the fact. This is an interactive starter activity that students really engage with.

This resource offers a comprehensive list of techniques used by the media to influence consumers. This list can be used in a variety of ways. Students could use it to identify techniques used in adverts or they could use it to create their own advert. There are 15 different techniques listed: Association Bandwagon Beautiful People Bribery Celebrities Experts Explicit Claims Fear Humour Intensity Maybe Plain Folks Repetition Testimonials Warm & Fuzzy

These are two little sheets to stick in the front of students' books. The 'marking key' is a simple guideline for students to understand your own little codes and markers that you use when marking their books. You would fill this in together at the start if the year by writing your own symbols on the board. The 'personal targets' sheet is for students to self-assess themselves at the start of the year. This allows you as a teacher to gauge an understanding of how the students self-assess. It is useful to look back on this at different points during the year to see whether students think they've made progress in certain areas.

This activity teachers students that good writers show us their characters rather than just telling us about them. Firstly, students look at an example of 'showing'. The example is a questionable supply teacher entering a classroom. Students are then asked to put their new-found knowledge to the test by transforming a 'telling' piece of description into a piece that 'shows' the character. This activity will last between 10-15 minutes.

This is a fun, dynamic lesson in which students are creative right from the start. They do a shared writing activity as a class before analysing an extract from John McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. This is an exemplary piece of descriptive writing entirely based on sounds. Students then start to plan their own piece of descriptive writing about a most loved or hated placed based entirely on sound. This then leads into students writing a descriptive piece about three paragraphs long that could be used as a writing assessment.

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 will ultimately be a revision aid for students studying texts through a narrative lense. They are asked to break a text down into its narrative building blocks and create a summary for each narrative block. On the actual resource there are prompts for each building block to help elicit a response. THE 7 NARRATIVE BUILDING BLOCKS: SCENES AND PLACES TIME AND SEQUENCE CHARACTERS VOICES IN THE STORY POINT OF VIEW DESTINATION

Blow this worksheet up to A3 size. Students draw lines between the characters and note down how they're connected. They can also jot down notes and quotes for individual characters. This will become a revision aid for students.

Drama Assessment Use this grid to assess students in drama. Simply write the student’s name in the left-hand column and put a tick or ‘T’ in some of the boxes on the right to indicate whether the drama skill is something they do really well, or something they need to work on. You can write additional comments if you wish. The idea is that after the drama assessment you can give students praise, their level and their target in an efficient way. All students then need to do is write down their level and target on the blue sheet at the front of their small yellow exercise books. This grid focuses on nine key skills in drama, including facial expressions, spatial awareness, voice projection etc.

This SOW focuses on persuasive techniques, language techniques, non-language devices and presentational features used in advertising to have an effect on the reader. Students develop their analytical skills before creating their own advert with commentary for their assessment. Although this may sound dull, students had real fun with this scheme and found it genuinely interesting. They thoroughly enjoyed the 'speed dating' to learn about different advertising techniques. The SOW uses the following learning objectives in its lessons: LESSON 1 To understand how images are composed, and how to read figure signs. LESSON 2 To understand how images use colour, texture and viewpoint. LESSON 3 To understand how persuasive language techniques as used in adverts. LESSON 4: To describe the effect of persuasive (language) techniques used in adverts. LESSON 5 To analyse language techniques and presentational features in an advert. LESSON 6 To create own advert using knowledge and skills gained from analysis. LESSON 7 To create own advert using knowledge and skills gained from analysis. INDEPENDENT TASK TIME LESSON 8 To create own advert using knowledge and skills gained from analysis. INDEPENDENT TASK TIME

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.

This is a fantastic starter, guaranteed to engage the most disaffected students. Students look at images and decipher the message. For example, there is the letter 'X' made of cardboard boxes in one image, the message would be 'X-Box'. The practice image is 'hairspray'. The answers for each 'visual pun' are in the 'notes' box on PPT. This is a quick 5-10 minute starter that gets students thinking about more than what's at surface level. This activity could be a route into a lesson on looking for deeper meanings, inference and deduction.

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.

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.

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?

Here's a fun plurals starter with a competitive element - bound to engage the boys! In 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' style, this activity asks students to pluralise different words. As the monetary amount increases, the words get more and more difficult. For example, the £100 word is 'face', the £16,000 is 'goose', the £125,000 word is 'quiz' and the £1,000,000 is 'ox'. There are two versions of the game to play on two separate occasions; the second round takes students from 'house' (£100) to 'stimulus' (£1,000,000). This is a fun, competitive starter that engages students in plurals - incredible!

A starter which explains the three different sentence types with examples, making reference to main clauses, subordinate clauses and embedded clauses. Ideal to use as an introduction to a piece of creative/descriptive writing where you'd expect students to use varied sentences.