High-quality, value for money teaching resources covering English language and literature; literacy; history; media and Spanish. With twenty-seven years' teaching experience I know what works in the classroom. Engaging, thorough and fun, your students will love these lessons.
High-quality, value for money teaching resources covering English language and literature; literacy; history; media and Spanish. With twenty-seven years' teaching experience I know what works in the classroom. Engaging, thorough and fun, your students will love these lessons.
Have oodles of fun designing your own theme park. This step-by-step Word guide explains how to create a marketing campaign for your very own theme park. The steps include:
Create a name and a logo for your theme park.
Design four new rides for your park and write a sentence to sell each of them.
Create two areas to appeal small children.
Create a new on-site hotel with themed rooms.
Put it all together in a leaflet to publicise the theme park.
This sixteen-page booklet contains example texts which have been marked-up to highlight key features.
Twenty-seven lessons with powerpoint and worksheets on this popular novel by Suzanne Colllins.
Lessons include:
District 12
Theseus and the minotaur - the influence of the myth
The Reaping
Katiniss’ character
Peeta’s character
Going to the capitol
Role of reality TV
In the arena
Using a variety of sentences, emulate Collin’s style.
Describe your own muttation.
Describe places.
Create a Hunger Games board game.
Students enjoy this film and you can treat them with the DVD too!
This student workbook contains activities based on poems from Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetry antholgy entitled “Talking Turkeys”. There are twelve lessons covering the following poems - “Greetings”, “Bodytalk”, “Running”, “Fear Not”, “Little Sister”, “According To My Mood”, “De Generation Rap”, “Civil Lies”, “For Sale”, “Who’s Who”, “Heroes” , “Memories” and “Pride”. There is also “Checking Out Me History” by John Agard included for comparison. Creative writing tasks include writing about a hero and writing about a time when you felt proud. This is designed to engage and enthuse low ability students with fun activities on the great Benjamin Zephaniah. An added bonus is a powerpoint that encourages students to write about a relative.
Have fun exploring ideas about animal cruelty with Benjamin Zephaniah’s hilarious poem “Talking Turkeys”. This folder contains a cloze exercise on the poem to engage students directly with the text with follow-up comprehension questions. There are then three more powerpoint options for further exploration. Students can either create a leaflet to persuade people to give up turkey and eat something else at Christmas. Or if you are looking for a Christmas themed activity, students can use the poem as inspiration for their own Christmas poem. And don’t forget to watch Mr Zephaniah in action on Youtube, performing said poem in a bright pink shell suit. Not to be missed!
Many students write stories in which they jump between the present and the past tenses. This Powerpoint explains the difference between the simple past and the simple present tenses and contains a variety of exercises to encourage tense consistency and to help them to feel more confident. The zipped file also contains two informative and practical follow-up worksheets which ask students to put a passage about William the Conqueror into the past tense. The other worksheet asks them to put information about the Titanic into the past tense also.
This Powerpoint introduces the historical context of witches in Macbeth with a true or false game where students have to identify the correct or incorrect statements about witches. Students are then given some information about James V1th’s role in witchcraft persecution. Before studying Act One Scene One they are presented with a modern translation so that they understand what is going on. They then read Shakespeare’s Act One Scene One and consider what was lost in the translation and why Shakespeare’s scene is much more powerful. Students enjoy reading and acting out the scene in groups. They are then asked to design three costumes for a modern version of the play, focusing on representing the witches as powerful, evil and frightening. At the end of the lesson, you can show them Roman Polanski’s opening scene and compare and contrast their costumes with Polanski’s choices. Could be used as a precursor to my lesson on the witches’ spell; as part of an introduction to Shakespeare or as part of a scheme on Macbeth.
In Act One Scene One of “Romeo and Juliet”, we meet Romeo for the first time and realise that he is in love with the idea of being in love with Rosaline due to his use of elaborate oxymorons to describe his feelings. This powerpoint explains the context of the play, the definition of oxymorons. The accompanying worksheet guides students to identify Romeo’s oxymorons and then gives them the beginning of oxymorons for them to create themselves. Could be used with the play or as a stand alone lesson on oxymorons.
Teach your students the importance of using positive adjectives when selling a product through the medium of travel writing. Using two texts - one on the Algarve in Portugal and the other on Dubai, students learn how effective positive adjectives are through two fill-in-the-blank exercises. All answers are given on the powerpoint and all cloze exercises are on word documents. Finally, students use their new-found knowledge to sell their hometown using positive adjectives.
This twenty-one page student workbook contains twelve poems on the theme of football, designed to engage reluctant readers. Each poem has an accompanying activity. The culminating activity is for students to write a letter to their local newspaper arguing either for or against the case that the job of a football manager has become too stressful today. Stimulus material to promote discussion on this includes newspaper reports on sacked managers. This is an absolute bargain, even if I do say so myself!
Poems include:
Boys’ Game
Give us back our ball, missus
Oi, Ref
Goalpost Blues
Several haikus - write your own haiku
England v Germany
A Manager’s Tale
Letter to Newspaper
There’s only one Michael Owen
It Makes You Think
Hard Man
Introduce your students to the fascinating story of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre with this thirty-four slide powerpoint, complete with visually stimulating images to illustrate the information.
The follow-up activities include:
A twenty-three sentence cloze exercise to help students embed and remember the information.
Diagrams of the theatre to label.
An interview with an imaginary theatre-goer to stimulate further understanding of the context.
Support for a writing task where students imagine that they have been to see a Shakespeare play.
True or false on Shakespeare’s Globe.
Written information on Shakespeare’s Globe that could be used for homework.
Transport your students back in time to the seventeenth century with this comprehensive folder of resources!
Travel writing is one of the best ways to teach students to use language in a sophisticated way. In this project students choose a city or region of the world that they are interested in and create a travel guide on it using the example provided as a style model. The style model is about the Spanish city of Girona and the sections of the travel guide include:
An introduction
3 Days in your chosen destination.
Four of the best things to do there.
Essential information with top tips for visiting.
Final section original to the student.
Students’ attention is drawn to the use of premodifying adjectives and imperatives, which are typical of this style of writing. Students are able to see how travel writers sell destination through interweaving information about history, modernity and cuisine to make their locations sound exciting and attractive. There is also the possibility to turn the travel guide into a speaking and listening activity as students imagine that they work for the tourist board of their destination and wish to promote it.
This forty-four slide powerpoint on “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson contains four lessons covering the four sections of the poem and a final writing assessment task. The folder includes:
Powerpoint with four lessons, using paintings by Sir John Waterhouse and others to inspire and engage students.
A storyboard of the setting in Part 1.
Comprehension questions on Part 2.
Image of Sir Lancelot to analyse his presentation in Part 3.
Opportunities to explore the themes and symbolic meaning of the poem.
Two worksheets to support the task of writing about the lady and the events in the poem from the point of view of Sir Lancelot.
These resources will help your students to fully engage with Lord Tennyson’s beautiful, magical and mysterious poem.
This folder contains everything that you need to understand Maya Angelou’s brilliantly uplifting poem.
A 48 slide Powerpoint introduces the poem and then goes through the significant features verse by verse. A separate Word timeline of facts from the advent of slavery in America to the Civil Rights Movement contextualises the poem. Follow-up activities include visualising the positive images used in the poem. A copy of the poem is also included.
Full scheme of work with one lesson per chapter, totalling twenty-one chapters on Benjamin Zephaniah’s teen classic “Face”. Also included are narrative writing tasks; a literature essay on Martin’s character and a letter to Mr Zephaniah after reading the text. This full scheme of work would suit year 8 students and has lots of literacy activities on prefixes, suffixes, abbreviations, puns, complex sentences etc, all linked to the novel. There are also opportunities to explore in depth the key themes of friendship and bravery. Every class I have ever taught this novel to have absolutely loved it. Hook your students in with some of Mr Benjamin Zephaniah’s magic.
A basic scheme of work aimed at weaker students that you can build on and develop for students of higher ability. Eleven powerpoints guide you through the text with ideas for development. Many storyboards of the action are included to reinforce understanding of the plot. Background work includes a powerpoint on Mary Shelley and the history of the discovery of electricity.
Help your students to recognize and identify bias in newspaper reports. Students are presented with two newspaper reports which they have to make more biased using the techniques that they have identified throughout the lesson. Help your students to become more savvy readers of the media.
Working on the assumption that people remember things better if like is grouped with like, this booklet contains twenty-one lists of commonly mis-spelled words, all under different categories. Ranging from adjectives to adverbs to animals to birds to body parts to food and sports, the concept is that students will remember the spellings more easily if they can remember patterns and connections between words. This free resources complements the booklet “The Definitive Guide to Spelling” found at Mrs Shaw’s Shop, which is a seventy-four page booklet covering all the major spelling rules with exercises and answers, on sale at just £10. This photocopiable resource is a bargain for anyone wanting to help their students improve their spelling.
Free worksheet on spelling words ending in Y.
Check out Mrs Shaw’s Shop for more new interactive spelling powerpoints with fun cartoon graphics and all answers provided, designed to engage and interest your students, at the same time as embedding the learning.