A 7-week scheme to teach ‘Macbeth’ (Shakespeare) to a Year 9 English class. In this scheme I’ve included: a very basic SoL/SoW breakdown; the lesson slides; relevant worksheet tasks or activity sheets (if not already embedded in the lesson slides; and assessment tasks: a creative writing/speech (performance) task, and an analysis/essay task. You can use these tasks if you like, or adjust to suit your department’s requirements. There are three key scenes where I quite like to have theatre props available to get the students performing (especially to gain a better understanding of the impact of that scene): A1S1 with the witches opening the play A3S4 for their performance of Banquo’s ghost A4S1 when the witches give Macbeth the apparitions/prophecies about Macduff.

This is just a short, 3-week unit to introduce poetry in Secondary English, as well as giving students a head start with their GCSE Poetry Anthology if they are studying the ‘Power and Conflict’ Cluster. In this unit I have included: a very basic SoL/SoW breakdown; the lesson slides; the booklet; any additional handouts; and both a practice and true assessment. It is up to you whether you use this or not; in my infinite wisdom, while I was teaching abroad, I decided to somehow combine the structures of a Language Paper with the text content of a Literature Paper, so this has a poem but with questions laid out like the GCSE English Language Paper 1. Please feel free to tear apart and adjust as needed.

An 8-week scheme to teach ‘And Then There Were None’ (book) to a Year 9 English class. In this scheme I’ve included: a very basic SoL/SoW breakdown; the lesson slides (some are very simple reading questions, as many of the chapters take a fair bit of time to read through, while others have more complex activities, e.g. paragraph analysis practice); relevant worksheet tasks or activity sheets (embedded in the relevant lesson slides); extension questions for each chapter to stretch higher-ability students; and assessment tasks: an analysis/essay task, and an argumentative writing/speech task. *For the best effect in teaching this text, I’ve set out the scheme so that the reveal after the Epilogue isn’t read until AFTER the speech task; I designed the speech task to be like a detective’s presentation of evidence based on who each student thinks is the killer. Tell them not to do further research online (all the evidence they need should be in the text), as they WILL encounter spoilers. This makes the reading of the reveal that much sweeter, as the ones who got it right feel validated. You can use these tasks if you like, or adjust to suit your department’s requirements.

A 9-week scheme to teach ‘The Hunger Games’ (book) to a Year 9 English class. In this scheme I’ve included: a very basic SoL/SoW breakdown; the lesson slides (some are very simple reading questions, as some of the chapters take a fair bit of time to read through, while others have more complex activities, e.g. paragraph analysis practice); relevant worksheet tasks or activity sheets; a chapter-by-chapter storyboard, to help those who need support with reading; and assessment tasks: a creative writing task, an analysis/essay task, and a speech task. You can use these tasks if you like, or adjust to suit your department’s requirements. In the past, I’ve bought the film on YouTube and dipped in and out throughout the unit; it used to take me 10 weeks if I included film catch-up days, i.e. we would read a certain set of chapters, and then do a film lesson to watch that section as a comparison along with activities. You could do it this way, or focus on film catch-up at the end as a post-reading activity.

A 6-week scheme to teach ‘Of Mice and Men’ (novella) to a Year 9 English class. In this scheme I’ve included: a very basic SoL/SoW breakdown; the lesson slides (some are very simple reading questions, as some of the chapters take a fair bit of time to read through, but these are interspersed with context-building lessons with more activities, e.g. paragraph analysis practice); relevant worksheet tasks or activity sheets; and assessment tasks: two practice analysis tasks, an analysis/essay task, and a creative writing/multimedia/speech task. You can use these tasks if you like, or adjust to suit your department’s requirements. If you wanted to extend the unit by a further week, you could also watch the 1992 film directed by Gary Sinise and follow up with a comparison to the book (e.g. How faithful is the adaptation, and how important is it for this text in particular?).

This is just a short, 3-week unit to introduce students to film studies, using ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ as the focal film. In this unit of work I’ve included: a very basic SoW/SoL breakdown; the lesson slides; relevant worksheet tasks or activity sheets; and both a practice and true assessment task, based loosely on the GCSE English Language Paper, but with a focus on directorial choices such as camera angles, movements, use of light, sound, contrast, colour theory, and language within the dialogue. This unit could be used to add onto a Media scheme, or if you have a few weeks left over near the end of a term.