Ask students to close their eyes and put their heads on the table. Play Thomas Newman track and read the second-person edit of Chapter Two's description of the garage. Read the description slowly to allow students to imagine how Michael would feel entering the garage. After you've read the description, allow students 1-2 minutes to reflect with their eyes closed. Explain that once they open their eyes, they're to write down how they felt in the given situation. Ask students to share with a partner. De-brief post-activity; ask students: ‘How did it feel to do that?’ This activity should help students to engage with Michael's character and how he feels when entering the garage where Skellig resides.

Students will need access to a computer to complete this activity. Put students into small groups and issue A4 paper one of the questions from the Questions Pack.. Students are to create an attractive poster which provides the answers to the question(s) they've been given. After 30 minutes, students are to 'present' their poster to the rest of the group. Students are to make notes in their books so that they have a record of the contextual information about Skellig. Display students' posters in your classroom as a point of reference throughout the study of Skellig.

This resource offers a fun way of researching WW1 context. Before the lesson print of the questions and put them into colour-coded piles. You'll need as many questions as you have groups of students. For example, if you have 6 groups, you must have 6 print-outs of the questions. You'll need 6 x yellow questions, 6 x green questions, 6 x blue questions etc. Put students in teams of 3-4 students. Students must have immediate access to a laptop or computer to be able to find the answers to the questions. You need to put the piles of questions on your desk. Issue Q1 to all groups and 1 piece of paper to all groups for them to write their answers on. Groups must find the answer to Q1, write it down on their answer sheet and then bring their answer sheet to you. If the answer is correct, you issue them with Q2, and so on until groups have found all the answers to all the questions. It is basically a race to the finish, but the answers must be of quality because you have to 'okay' them before they're issued with the next question. Students enjoy the competitive element of this task. You may wish to give the winning group a small prize as an added incentive. Discuss the contextual research once the task is over and discuss its links with the poems being studied.

Poetic devices glossary to assist with students' study of poetry.

Language devices to use when writing to argue and persuade, put helpfully into the mneumonic 'A RED FOREST'. When I was teaching students to write to argue, I display the language devices around the room to encourage students to look for them and use them.

This resource contains a PPT and a selection of poems for students to practise approaching unseen poetry. The PPT guides students through the following: 1. Title 2. Shape/form 3. Personal response 4. Voice 5. Vocabulary 6. Imagery 7. Structure 8. Interpretation Encouraging students to look at these aspects of a poem will enable them to engage and understand the unseen poem.

Students are to work in pairs. Issue one line from the poem to each pair. Students are to analyse the language closely to try to learn about the speaker’s feelings. Motivate students by asking them to imagine their police detectives, with only one sentence of the criminal’s confession to analyse. They are to read the line deeply to consider the multiple layers of meaning. Model activity. Whole-class feedback. Students should write down what their peers say.

Do ‘Starter Activity for Descriptive Writing’; this should put students in the right mind-set for descriptive writing. This activity should encourage students to tune into their senses, which is an essential skill for writing descriptively. Ideally, students should use mini whiteboards, but if these are not available, then exercise books are satisfactory. Hand-out ‘An Example of Writing to Describe’ sheet. Ask students, in pairs, to read it through and highlight – in different colours – the words and sentences that relate to the five senses. Recap the five senses – sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Feedback. Ask students why description is important. Hand-out ‘Planning Sheet for Descriptive Writing’. Explain that, as it is a planning sheet, it does not matter if they alter or change their ideas throughout. They are to write about a place or event, perhaps building on the ideas they established in the starter activity. Students could write up their piece of descriptive writing as a writing assessment.

This short activity tests students' ability to follow instructions. It is a fun starter and shows students the importance of reading ALL the instructions before starting a task.

In this lesson students revisit the features of gothic stories before identifying them in an extract from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Students are then told that they'll be re-telling a popular nursery rhyme in the gothic genre. They are shown examples of Jack and Jill in the 'romance' genre and then the 'gothic' genre to give them an idea of how a nursery rhyme can be adapted. Students then choose and nursery rhyme and have a go themselves. From personal experience, students absolutely love this activity and it really gets their creative juices flowing. It allows for very rich, high quality descriptive writing. This lesson is compatible with all abilities, but very successful with high ability KS3 students.

Issue Belfast Confetti ‘Wordle’ to students. Explain that the Wordle contains the entire poem, with the prepositions removed. All that’s there is the core vocabulary; these lexical words provide the meaning of the poem. Tell students that you want them to sort the words into lexical sets (groups of words that are associated by meaning), categories essentially. Ask students to invent their own groupings and categories and find their own associations: for example, punctuation or place names. Students may then decide to create thematic categories. Through this activity students can ‘discover’ patterns of meaning, for instance underlying metaphors, before reading the poem and seeing them revealed in the true context of the whole text.

This is a fun way of offering further exploration of Bayonet Charge by appealing to students' different strengths and skills, e.g. artistic, creative, visual, mathematical or social. This is an engaging, outstanding lesson, and was designed with Garner's Multiple Intelligences in mind. You will need to prepare for this lesson beforehand by creating the 'resource stations': Resource Station 1: Visual – Saving Private Ryan Clip, available on YouTube, lined paper (x5), instructions Resource Station 2: Creative – activity (x5), lined paper (x5), instructions Resource Station 3: Social – activity, instructions Resource Station 4: Artistic – plain A4 paper, activity, instructions Resource Station 5: Mathematical – activity (x5), instructions Lesson Plan: Ensure that students are sat in groups of five. Tell them that the group they’re sat with is their ‘home group’. Show students the ‘resource stations’ slide. Explain to students that they’ll see five different resource stations around the room. Explain the activity at each resource station. Explain that each group will send one group member to each resource station to complete the activity. After 20 minutes, all group members will return to their home group and feedback what they’ve learnt. Give groups one minute to decide which group member will go to each resource station. If they cannot decide, then they’ll be randomly numbered one-five and will go to the corresponding station. Check students’ understanding by using ‘thumbs-up’. Ask a student to re-explain if there’s misunderstanding. Allow students to move to their designated resource station to start their activity. Instructions and resources will be ready at each station. Teacher facilitates, circulates, ask students questions to deepen their learning. After 20 minutes, students are to return to their ‘home groups’ to feedback. Tell them that they have 10 minutes and they should hear from everybody. Ask students in their books to write down three things they feel they’ve learnt from other people about Bayonet Charge.

Work through the PowerPoint for the lesson which includes a starter activity, contextual information, 'crunched poem' activity (creative, language analysis), annotated poem, exam question and comparison activity. This could cover 1-2 lessons.

Issue sets of these cards to groups or pairs. Students are to sequence them in the correct order. Great as a quick starter activity to get students thinking about the order of events in the play. Extend the task by asking students to find quotations to accompany all or some of the events.