Having taught Functional Skills English within an FE setting, I understand how difficult it can be to reach students within a curriculum area and to encourage engagement with English. Often not being specialists in those areas ourselves as English Teachers, embedding can be a challenge. My largest challenge was often with students of hair and beauty and so I devised this work pack which worked fantastically well. This pack embeds E3 and L1 English elements into areas of hair and beauty such as face shapes, hair disasters and nail art, incorporating celebrity culture. This pack builds as you move through it, looking at areas such as reading for information, proofreading, identifying correct homophones and descriptive / persuasive writing. I found with my groups that this did not need to be a taught session but rather they ran with it themselves and engaged independently with it, leaving me to act in a supportive role rather than a lead delivery role. This is down to the group and paired activities within the pack, discussion topics and the options for students to make choices and to design their own nail art. This pack encourages a positive attitude towards English and helps students to see how it can help in their chosen industry. IHope it helps.

This lesson is focused around one of the, arguably, harder questions from paper 1 of the AQA exam - question 4. This lesson is quick paced, supportive and full of student focused activities. This lesson focuses around students formulating their own opinions and thoughts on the characters, Robbie and Cecilia from the book Atonement. Many tasks are designed to provoke deeper, independent thought from students with plenty of group and paired activities so students can discuss and share ideas, promoting critical thinking and independent learning skills. Tasks come with word banks and starter sentences for those who struggle to get started yet they can also be used to push the more able in your class to formulate deeper and more insightful answers and ideas . This lesson come with a full lesson powerpoint with enough material to fill a 3 hour lesson, extract and trailer for the movie, 3 worksheets and a support scaffold which can be distributed in class to support students. The session ends with a quick peers assessment task. Hope it helps.

Great bite sized assessment created to recreated question 4 from paper 1 on the AQA GCSE English Language exam. This assessment is based from the short story "Glass, Bricks and Dust". These bite sized assessments are a perfect tool for tracking individuals progress and for gaining a clear picture of which questions a student will have the most difficulty with come exam time. Hope it helps

This fantastic and fun lesson can be used with either AQA or Edexcel exam boards for GCSE English language. This lesson focuses on writing skills, emphasising ambitious vocabulary, developing language / structural features and writing for an audience. It is a perfect refresher to build on already taught skills and is an excellent lesson to use after a break or half term to re-inspire students and re-engage them in to English. This full lesson has enough material to fill 3 hours and can be used as one complete session or broken into 2 sessions, it is designed to re-awaken students imagination and uses plenty of bite sized group and team activities to encourage self motivation and independent learning. This session starts off with the "design your dream house" theme and uses MTV Cribs and plenty of stimulating visuals to inspire students and get their engines running. It ends with a look at Tolkiens description of a Hobbit Hole and the use of structural features used to engage his audience and bring them on a journey , therefore progressing students skill level from simple descriptive writing to something more sophisticated. The final main task is for the students to write a piece of mind blowing descriptive writing of their own dream house using all the skills covered. Resources include ppt of the full lesson with slides which can be printed and distributed, Hobbit extract with Q&A section, video with accompanying worksheet, writing scaffold, MTV cribs blurb sheet for those who don't know the programme. This lesson has engaged and inspired students every time I have used it and has lead to some really great pieces of writing. Hope it helps.

This lesson was a big hit amongst my students and co-workers as it is a stretch and challenge lesson designed to be used once the students are comfortable with identifying and explaining language features. It is a quick paced and fun lesson, with enough material to fill 3 hours and it can be used with either AQA or EDEXCEL GCSE English Language exam papers. Using a extract from Oscar Wilde’s A picture of Dorian Gray this lesson takes your students through ,step by step, a deeper thinking process to help them access tricker texts which may crop up in the exam - where the answers are not obvious but hidden. To do this, the resource uses a trailer from the movie, there are group and paired activities, group discussions to promote shared learning and develops your students self confidence in being able to formulate ideas and answers on their own merit. These tasks are all designed to help your students accumulate everything they need to answer the final question, which is structured how it would be in the live exam. Please be aware that TES preview can distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This resource is an 8 page group of worksheets which can be used to design your own lesson around depending on which exam board you are working with in GCSE English. Using the prologue from the 1st book of George RR Martins series, this resource looks at language and structural features. It comes with worksheets for a range of levels, starting simple with read and obtain questions, working our way up to inference, language analysis and strong example answers with stretch and challenge tasks. The resources are designed so you can develop a teacher led lesson around them or set self study or independent learning seminar sessions with teacher acting as support or facilitator as the worksheets allow for paired or team interaction between the students. There is enough material for a 3 or more hour session, which can be broken into 2 or more sessions depending on your timetable. Hope it helps.

Independent study resource to help students with identifying and using inference in their answers for paper 1 question 2. This resource uses extracts from The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, it helps students to break down the extract and to examine the language an author has used whilst also supporting students to use a structured answer format (point, quote, infer). Hope it helps

This exciting lesson is designed to help students prepare for paper 1 question 1 from the AQA English Language exam - spec 8700. It's primary focus is to help students gain a understanding of inference and how to use it in a structured answer for the exam. This is done by weaving activities focused on PQI (POINT, QUOTE, INFERENCE) around clips from the Tom Hardy movie "Warrior" (cert 12A) in where we look the Character of Tommy, played by Tom Hardy, and use inference to examine what kind of person he is. This lesson uses bite sized activities to keep the lesson moving forward at a good pace and to engage the students, this includes team activities and class discussions. The lesson includes some high level analysis of the character of Tommy and low level activities to help those who have mixed level classes reach all students. Hope it helps

One of the ways I try to bring English to life for my students is to show them how versatile English is by embedding it into a wide range of topics. I like to choose topics which will engage or strike a cord with my students. One of my sessions which has done this is this one, which looks at the ever increasing problem in the UK, the illegal trade in primates. This lesson is designed for those classes which are " slow burners" with the aim of slowly introducing a topic and building towards the practice exam question. Although Q3 from Paper 2 is based on a period piece of text, this lesson uses a modern text to help first develop the skills in learning, identifying and analysing language features before moving onto older / tricker texts, as in my experience…an older text tends to throw students and will lower their confidence or willingness to engage. The trick here is to show students that there is no difference in the skill used, just a difference in the text provided. This is a complete lesson with enough interesting and engaging material for a 3 hour session. It comes with a power point full of group /paired / individual tasks and starter and self / peers assessment activities. Also included are 2 worksheets and 3 short video clips. This lesson hopefully will build your students confidence in tackling this question, despite the era the text may come from. The theme of this lesson goes down well with students as it is based around the UK pet trade in small monkeys and is designed to help raise cultural awareness and British Values in animal welfare within young people. Due to this, this lesson can be expanded upon if needs be to include a group debate or discussion to hit the criteria of the speaking and listening element of the spec. Please be aware that the TES preview distorts the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection, hope it helps

This resource is an entire lesson with enough material to fill up a 3 hour session or 2 smaller sessions. The session aim to help students practice their skills for paper 2 question 4, the comparison between a modern and older text on the same theme / topic. The topic of this session is immigration and looks at the immigration of Irish people to America and modern day Syrian refugees and underpins the idea of equality and compassion. Comparison materials are a letter written in 1884 and a poem written in 2017. I have found that in a world of fake news, memes and multicultural classrooms that students are very interested in these topics as they are often unsure of today's world and it's politics. This is a lesson which is designed to let the students do most of the thinking and analysing and is a perfect session to deliver as exam dates become nearer and they need to become more independent in delivering answers and insight. There are plenty of short timed paired and team activities which build up students knowledge and insight and ends with a chance to deliver a exam style answer and a short self assessment. Worksheets come with support material to help those who struggle and open questions to push those who are more capable. Please keep in mind that at times the TES preview somehow distorts slides and worksheets and that is not reflective of how the resource will look when downloaded. Hope it helps.

This is a brilliant resource I have used with both GCSE and Functional English students to help them understand bias writing and inference. I have an FE background and so encouraged to embed English into other disciplines, this resource was initially used to teach dance students however I quickly found that students from almost any discipline responded to this resource and so its compatibility naturally grew. Therefore this resource can be used when teaching Paper 2 Question 3 with AQA GCSE English Language students or L2 FS. This resource uses a clip from Americas Best Dance Crew, this dance troop are diverse in culture, gender and age - as the youngest is only 15, knowing small details like this can help students confidence and can go a little way to helping to break down barriers of gender and culture. It also allows the teacher to expand on these ideas and themes if they so wanted to. This lesson uses group and team discussion, allows the students to share and build on their own ideas therefore encouraging independent discovery and learning and looks into biased writing, identifying biased language and phrases and ends with a final writing task of their own with a peer marking assessment. The identifying task is designed to challenge and there are words banks to support the weaker students. This resource can be altered and developed further to suit your course and / or students if desired. Hope it helps

This speaking and listening lesson focuses around the conspiracy theory that Princess Diana was murdered. Students love this lesson because many students love a good conspiracy theory. This lesson comes with videos to help students get a full background of her life and events. It requires the students to work together to collect their own research and develop their own opinions and counter arguments which will form part of the group debate. The videos don’t come with additional worksheets although they can be created to help form part of the students research as and when you feel necessary. This lesson can be used with any exam board and also with functional skills SP & LIST. It can be developed to underpin skills such as identifying bias and critical thinking. Please be aware that TES preview can often distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This is a short lesson to help students understand inference. I especially find that this lesson is useful with second language learners or lower level learners. This short lesson break down the concept of inference and shows how it can be used in various forms, such as speech, images and in fiction. The final task is to take an image of a wrecked house and “sell” the property in writing as an estate agent would, using language to mislead and infer. This can be used with any exam board and with L2 Functional Skill learners. Hope it helps

This is a complete mock paper 2 exam for the AQA English Language 8700 spec. It features all questions from 1 - 5 in the style of AQA , The sources are a twitter war between Perez Hilton and Lady Gaga and a letter written in 1874 by the poet AC Swinburne, both documents tackle the issue of public slander and public arguments. Please keep in mind that the TES preview can often distort the look of the resource, it is not always a true reflection of the how the resource truly appears. Hope it helps

This is a small introduction to improving your students sentence structures which can be used with GCSE English of all exam boards and Functional English classes. The session is based around a YouTube sensation and TV star Michael Cthulhu who makes"Big Giant Swords". It comes with a full powerpoint, support material and 2 videos. The lesson has group activities and individual tasks and is fast paced. I find this lesson works well with students who have completely disengaged with English or with classes largely made up of male students. As I teach within a college I teach English to students who are in grouped in their core subjects, such as bricklaying or music etc and embedding English into fun subjects such as these helps to break the barriers to learning. It is only an introduction so feel free to tinker into order to suit your students needs or to expand on the knowledge provided. Please keep in mind that the TES preview often distorts the preview and this is not a true reflection of the resources layout. Hope it helps.

This is a very simple break down of how to use speech marks suitable for Functional skills students or lower level students. There are 3 pages worth of examples and tasks with a small vocab builder task. This could work well as a piece of homework / extension activity or as a starter for the higher level students. Hope it helps

This is a simple card matching activity that can be used as a starter to help students with simple spellings by using mnemonics. This is great to use with lower level Functional Skills students or students with dyslexia. Feel free to use in a way which works with your students. Hope it helps

This is a simple activity which can be used to encourage students to proofread. It can be used with students of all levels, GCSE or Functional Skills, as it can be used as a starter, plenary, homework or as an extension activity. Please be advised that TES previews can often distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps

This work pack is designed for Functional skills and covers areas such as reading for information, summary writing and speaking & listening. The lesson is designed around the murder of Sophie Lancaster, who was killed for the way she dressed. This lesson touches upon issues such as equality, prejudice and British Values . Feel free to tinker with to suit the needs of your students. Please be aware that TES previews can at times distort the look of the resource and this is not true reflection. Hope it helps

This is a L2 activity based around the idea of a bucket list. This activity has 3 parts to it which include creating a list, researching activity and a writing activity. This activity has been created in order to be flexible with your teaching style and can be used as an extension, homework or form the main part of your session. It can also be amended underpin a specific topic. Please keep in mind that TES previews can distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps