Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
Show the PPT and discuss students' responses to the three questions.
Discuss Roald Dahl's quotation, and the short story features on slide 3.
Show slide 4 and issue Baby Shoes handout. Explain to students that this is a short story, just one sentence. Students are to read the ‘short story’ and think about the story behind it, e.g. Has a married couple lost a baby?
Encourage students to think a little more left-field, like is 'Baby Shoes, Never Worn' the name of a painting?
Students should jot down their ideas around the ‘short story’. They may discuss their ideas with a partner.
Introduce Ernest Hemingway. Students are to copy down notes into their exercise book.
Ask students to think of a collective name they would give to stories that are six words long, e.g. ‘sentence stories’. Encourage students to be inventive. They may discuss in pairs. Show slide 4; these are different names given to the shortest of short stories - are the ones students suggested up there?
Split students into seven groups. Give each group one piece of Flash Fiction stuck to a piece of A4 paper. As a group, they must decide the ‘story’ behind each piece of flash fiction. Model activity. Rotate the flash fiction allowing different groups to make notes on the same sheet of paper. Encourage students to think outside the box and not to go straight for the obvious.
After 10-15 minutes, make sure each group has one piece of flash fiction. Each group should read their flash fiction aloud and explain their story behind it. Students who are not presenting should listen, as they will be randomly selected to pick and explain their favourite piece of flash fiction.
(Optional) Issue question cards. Ask students to see whether the 'short story features' discussed earlier apply to the six-word stories.
As a final activity, students should have a go at writing their own 6-word short story. Share with the class.
Issue Question Cards
Grid for students to use to analyse and record their own day of talking, considering the participants, the purpose, the content etc. A grid is also included for students to analyse their parents' day of talking.
In this resource bundle are three activities to learn the language features on a magazine's front cover:
CARD SORT - cut out all of the cards and ask students to match up the feature with the example.
FEATURE DOMINOES - students essentially play a spoken version of dominoes in which they match up language features with examples. Detailed instructions included on resource..
BLOCKBUSTERS - students have the cross the square on the PPT vertically or horizontally by asking a series of questions about magazine language features.
MAGAZINE LAYOUT - students learn how a magazine is laid out. Firstly, put students in pairs. One partner spends 1-2 minutes studying the magazine layout before they have to turn over the sheet and try to explain to their partner how a magazine is laid out.
Students learn the following features:
Alliteration
Emotive language
Tag line
Left side third
Cover line
Imperative
Superlative
Sky line
Pun
Masthead
Second person pronoun
Interrogative
Hyperbole
Central image
Use of numbers
Connotation
Students are asked to analyse a short piece of dialogue between a teacher and student. They are to 'zoom' in on the language and focusing specifically on words, e.g. the difference between the words 'chat' and 'discussion'.
This PPT offers students two activities to practise close reading and inference. The first activity gives students a scenario in which they have to consider whether the protagonist is guilty of theft. The answer isn't very obvious so students have to closely read the passage to make a considered decision.
The second activity gives an RSPCA's description of a puppy for adoption. Students have to explain what they can infer from the passage based on evidence and reasoning.
Print off the slides in the PowerPoint and issue them to pairs or groups. Students are to analyse and annotate the opening lines with their ideas about what makes them effective and what makes them draw the reader in.
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.
GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS:
Narrative stance
Semantic field
Prosodic features
Syntax
Paralinguistic features
Idiolect
Figurative language
Imperative
Graphology
End-stopped line
Interrogative
Enjambment
Phonology
Pun
Colloquialism
Connotation
Dialect
Discourse structure
Genre
Lexis
Idiom
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.
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.
This is a resource to coincide with a unit of worked based on teaching the history of the English language. It is a dictionary for Lincolnshire Dialect. There is a lot of scope with this resource, e.g students could find out different versions of the word in alternate dialect. Or, alternatively, students write a play script in Lincolnshire Dialect - often with hilarious consequences, and mostly including farmers. Students then perform their plays which could become a speaking and listening assessment.
This resource offers a comprehensive list of techniques used by the media to influence consumers. This list can be used in a variety of ways. Students could use it to identify techniques used in adverts or they could use it to create their own advert.
There are 15 different techniques listed:
Association
Bandwagon
Beautiful People
Bribery
Celebrities
Experts
Explicit Claims
Fear
Humour
Intensity
Maybe
Plain Folks
Repetition
Testimonials
Warm & Fuzzy
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
This is a glossary of terms / features of spoken language. This is far from an exhaustive ‘list’ – just some basic terms that you should be familiar with for analysis of spoken language data. It's organised in alphabetical order. It can be used as a guide for students to annotate and identify features in spoken language date.
Example of resource:
Accent: the ways in which words are pronounced. Accent can vary according to the region or social class of a speaker.
Adjacency pairs: parallel expressions used across the boundaries of individual speaking turns. They are usually ritualistic and formulaic socially. For example: ‘How are you?’/ ’Fine thanks’
Back-channel features: words, phrases and non-verbal utterances [e.g. ‘I see’, ‘oh’, ‘uh huh’, ‘really’] used by a listener to give feedback to a speaker that the message is being followed and understood.
Blend word: words that are formed by combining parts of other words – e.g. jeans + leggings = jeggings.
This is a fun, engaging starter which gets students excited about writing.
Firstly, they watch the McCain Wedges advert before completing a guided writing activity where students write from the perspective of an inanimate object with question prompts. This often has hilarious results. The final activity offers student complete creative freedom, but please note, googly eyes are required.
Fun little starter to get students thinking. They're asked to look at 8 different objects and try to group them into pairs and explain their reasons why. Students can work individually, in a pair or in a group depending on their ability.
Students are asked to write a short paragraph about their weekend using three connectives from the list displayed in the PPT. Students are then asked to share their paragraph before reflecting on how connectives help to improve their writing.
Spelling activity based on unstressed vowels. Students learn what unstressed vowels are before trying to come up with tricks to remember spellings with unstressed vowels.