This is an 8 lesson unit designed for EAL students to explore a range of non-fiction forms as well as different cultures. It was designed to accommodate EAL students whom I taught in Asia. A wide range of activities such as blogging, writing for a website, vlogging and infographic creation. The unit culminates with a Speaking & Listening Dragon’s Den style presentation, where groups of students design a sauce for a culture of their choice and pitch it. Can be easily adapted to suit your local context/students, or fit into a larger Non-Fiction Unit. Contains all the necessary resources. Hope you have as much fun with this as I did!

Model essays written by anonymous past students for: Paper 1: Poetry -Carol Ann Duffy x1 Paper 1: Prose - 1984 x2 Extract Q & Whole Text Q high level responses for modelling/scaffolding

These lessons build skills for writing (and reading) and develop pupils awareness of how audience and text type dramatically impact style, register, tone and content. A series of lessons I used as part of a Non-Fiction unit. Geared for more able, but can be adapted. Lessons are particularly focused around using grammar for effect and stylistic conventions. However, the lessons do also develop reading skills parallel to writing. The final assessment is taken from a text in Cambridge English Checkpoint Stage 9 (Cambridge Curriculum). You can discard this, use your own text, or even allow the pupils freedom to invent or base their travel writing from a text of their choice or their own experiences. I had them base their travel writing on an informative text of a place, so they could also exercise their summarizing skills and deciding what content is relevant/most effective for the task.

This lesson explores with your students the value and importance of independent learning - an essential life skill. It sets up and contextualizes the power of this through an engaging starter which tells the true story of an experiment which has proved the potential of it - a must read for teachers in general Students are then encouraged to devise a success criteria for independent learning through discussion, analysis and evaluation. Following this, the groups set of to market what they learn for a specific topic - in this case I chose poetry (as an intro to iGCSE), but you can use this for pretty much anything. Finally, students must ‘market’ what they have learned through their chosen form. Plenary - Students refer back to the established criteria for independent learning and self assess their performance. You could also have them evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of it. This may span over 2 lessons.

This is a fun lesson in which students have to dissuade Mr. Trump from arming teachers with guns. The aim is to get students to be mindful about their audience when writing any transactional piece. Guaranteed to engage and get some laughs! Teaches the technique of dsyphemism Mid to high ability but can always be adapted

I absolutely loved loved loved doing this lesson! It’s super basic, but a really engaging way to get students thinking about the central issue of social responsibility. By rooting the lesson in a modern day example before revealing anything about the play itself, it helps students to appreciate the message and continuing relevance of not just this piece of work, but literature and drama in general. The lesson is centered around the Notre Dame fire and gets students to consider whether the money raised for it can be justified when there are people going hungry. Thus, pupils contemplate Priestley’s message in the context of today’s world before even reading the play, and reflect on their own sense of morality and justice, as well as how society today is behaving. The main activity is more of a non-fiction/transactional writing task ( I like to sometimes interweave skills from different topics) but you could scrap this and have the main activity be something totally different such as a debate. Anyway, its fun and the kids absolutely love talking about this concept

Just a fun, engaging creative writing lesson that, in my experience, has really captivated students. It doesn’t necessarily teach anything new, so you can adapt this as you want. The selling point of this is its multi-sensory appeal - with intense and memorable visuals and even WW1 artillery playing in the background. It’s just an immersive way to stimulate creative writing and presents like a graphic novel almost. You don’t even need to be reading the book to use this - it can be used as a one off if you wish! I think it’s good for low to mid ability, but again you can tweak as you like to suit your learners. Used it successfully with my EAL class recently! Hope you enjoy!

A model essay for the iGCSE Literature Drama Paper 2 ''The Crucible"