This exam question PEE plan is applicable to all questions on AQA's English Literature Paper 1. It allows a space for the question, and then separates it off into the two bullet points, then allowing students space to plan their PEE paragaphs. Students find this plan very clear and simple to use. It allows them to organise their thoughts and plan a coherent exam response.

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.

This scheme of work contains 13 lessons with over 35 resources, taking students right through the play. It is a comprehensive scheme of work that was incredibly successful with Year 9 students of varying abilities. It includes a reading, writing and speaking & listening assessment. This SOW includes film clips and drama to really engage students with the play. Opportunities to differentiate tasks for higher or lower abilities are highlighted in green in the SOW. Whilst the scheme was put together by me, some resources are taken from the RSC Shakespeare Toolkit for Teachers. The SOW has the following reading, writing and speaking & listening assessments: READING - Starting with this speech (Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 2, Scene 1), explain how far you think Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a tragic hero. WRITING - Letter from Macbeth to Lady Macbeth arguing for or against her ideas. SPEAKING & LISTENING - Dramatic performance of Act 3, Scene 4 (the banquet scene with the ghost of Banquo) The SOW takes students through the following learning objectives: LESSON 1 To understand the characteristics of a tragedy and to understand the battle described at the opening of Macbeth LESSON 2 To explore the meeting between Macbeth, Banquo and the Witches and how to make interpretive choices about the stage of the scene. LESSON 3 To develop an understanding of characters’ thoughts and motives LESSON 4 To understand the persuasive tactics that Lady Macbeth uses to influence Macbeth. LESSON 4.5 To construct a letter that has a clear purpose. LESSON 5 To understand how Macbeth makes the decision to kill Duncan LESSON 6 To understand the Macbeths’ reactions to their murder of Duncan LESSON 7 To understand the motivations of Macbeth and Banquo in the aftermath of the murder of King Duncan. LESSON 8 To understand how Act 3, Scene 4 works dramatically. LESSON 9 To recap the plot and to develop an understanding of how Shakespeare has presented Macbeth as a `tragic hero. LESSON 10 To understand the rise and fall of Macbeth / To identify dramatic devices and to start planning your essay LESSON 11 To structure an essay response to Macbeth which analyses language and dramatic devices. LESSON 12 To see a performance of Macbeth LESSON 13 To see a performance of Macbeth

GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS: Accent Adjacency pairs Back-channel features Blend word Contraction Deixis / deictics Dialect Discourse markers Elision Ellipsis False start Fillers Hedge Idiolect Interactional talk Initialism Jargon Micropause Non-fluency features Overt prestige Paralinguistic features Phatic talk Prosodic features Received Pronunciation Repairs Slang Sociolect Standard English Tag question Transactional talk Transcript Turn taking Utterance Vague language 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 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

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 is an excellent, fun and challenging quiz to do with secondary school students in an English lesson. This quiz tests students’ knowledge of children’s and teen literature. There are 52 opening lines - one for every week of the year - for students to try and identify. Students must decide which story the opening line comes from. Depending on your students’ ability, you can use the optional clues provided on each slide, available simply by clicking ‘clue’ on each slide. You can also challenge students to not only guess the story’s title but also the story’s author. There is plenty of scope for differentiation. Some notes for how to complete this activity are included in the ‘notes’ section the PowerPoint slides. Sample opening lines: “All children, except one, grow up.” - Peter Pan "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy." - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe “I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.” - Skellig "My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue.” - Twilight “Sophie couldn’t sleep. A brilliant moonbeam was slanting through a gap in the curtains. It was shining right on her pillow.” - BFG The opening lines range from The Hungry Caterpillar to The Fault in our Stars. This quiz is a fun thing to do at Christmas or at the end of term, or just as part of a reading lesson to encourage students to read by engaging them in the opening lines. This quiz also offers opportunity for students to discuss which opening lines are their favourites, perhaps encouraging them to seek out the stories to read for themselves.

This 23 slide PowerPoint (for teachers) contains 50+ FUN activities for students to do when reading novels as a class. These tasks really do engage, enthuse and excite, and they can be used with any age group. Look at the 'previews' to see the kind of activities on offer. These activities really do jazz up 'reading' up students and gives them an active task when reading as a class.

Using this sheet, students map the rise and fall of Macbeth. They look at phrases used to describe Macbeth in the play. They must find evidence for each phrase. Once finished, this worksheet will illustrate - using quotations - the tragic downfall of Macbeth throughout the play.

Revision booklet full of activities for students to do at home, lasting 10 weeks. It gives clear activities and reading for students to do each week. There are practice exam questions throughout the booklet. The booklet functions as a workbook that students can hand in once they've finished. It's proved incredibly successful with GCSE students.

GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS: Alliteration Assonance Enjambment Content Emotive language Form/ Structure Imagery Metaphor Onomatopoeia End-stopped line Rhyme Simile Stanza Tone Voice Symbol Rhythm Personification Mood 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 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

Students are to review the play and consider reasons, with supportive quotations, as to whether or not Macbeth should kill King Duncan. This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.

Using the PowerPoint, explain to students the three main types of newspaper writing – news stories, features and opinion pieces. Students should make notes in their books as you explain to them. Quick test (slide 6): Ask students to decide whether the headlines are for news, features or opinion pieces. They should explain what clues helped them, e.g. the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ Issue the three Articles to pairs. Students are to decide which one is the news story, the feature article and the opinion piece. Students are to read the articles closely. Under the headings of ‘news stories’ ‘features’ and ‘opinion pieces’ in their book, students are to identify word level features in the different types of writing. Display slide 7 on the PowerPoint to assist students. But encourage students to be open-minded about what the find. Differentiation: some features will need explaining. For lower ability groups, delete tricky features as appropriate. After activity, ask students to explain what language features they're likely to find in a features article/news story/opinion piece? This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.

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.

Of Mice and Men Much of the plot in the novel is cyclical, as are the lives of the characters. The story opens and closes in the same place, the men’s lives are a routine of work - earn money - spend money in the flop-house - work, and many of the chapters begin and end in similar ways. There are lots of examples of foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck uses this technique to suggest that the characters couldn’t have avoided their fates – their destinies are inevitable. The task this resource offers is for students to look below the surface of the text and interpret how Steinbeck is offering clues about what will happen later on in the novel. I am looking for some original responses.

In this PPT are seven fantastic brain teasers. These will definitely get your tutees' brains whirring away. For example: What is light as a feather, but even the strongest man cannot hold it more than a few minutes? Answer: His breath.

Two lessons based on Simon Armitage's poem November. The learning objective for both lessons is to understand the subject matter of November, and identify/interpret the feelings and attitudes. These two lessons contain varied and exciting activities including sequencing activities, labelling the poem with pictures and relating the subject matter of the poem to themselves. There's a strong focus on the language of the poem and the different metaphors used.

This is a collection of quotations about what poetry is. Place these around the room before students enter. Ask students to 'tour' the room and find the quotations. They're to write down what quotations most resonate with them. Ask students to explain what poetry is to them. If students 'hate poetry', may be suggest to them that musical lyrics also class as poetry and ask them to express what music means to them.

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