There is so much fantastic stuff out there on Romeo & Juliet there seems no point in more of the same. So this is not about the main thrust of your teaching. What this resource offers is alternatives for differentiation, especially in homework and starters. Budget constraints often mean students can't take the text home and time constraints mean there is little time in the lesson to allow students to engage with the text independently - these tasks try to rectify this by a 'little and often' approach, making starters and homework more 'open' than has been the recent trend. To help you sort out the order of relevance I've numbered the work that clusters together. Hope you and your class can bring a little enjoyment back into studying Shakespeare.

After the first ‘getting to know you’ lesson, you want to get the measure of your students as well as help them get into your routines. This booklet contains 3 lessons that include self and peer assessment, SPaG, Reading and Writing tasks with answers, instructions, explanations and examples on the PP. The sections you need to mark are short, but quickly give you a sense of the student’s abilities, personality and emotional state. So don’t get tripped up by missing registers, not enough books or any of the other things that prevent a crisp start: print a set of booklets for your next y7s before the summer break and ease them into secondary school with bitesized tasks that form the basis of all KS3 tasks, but are KS2 friendly. On the back page of the booklet are handy reminders of the acronyms that students may’ve come across at primary school to help them proofread and correct their work.

This resource brings together the work done on poems individually to focus on a strategy for comparing and the actual comparison of the two poems.The PP begins the task with planning, then continues with self- and peer- checking. Targets are suggested in the last slide, to be adapted by the teacher as suits the actual class. A planning sheet handout to be enlarged to A3 ensures the AOs are covered at the planning stage. A further handout focuses on effective openings, stimulating discussion and then serving as a model for the essay opening. For very weak students there is a generic note on comparing poems with some useful words, phrases and prompts. The trial exam paper follows the style of the AQA exam.

This is a poem where structure undergirds the meaning of the poem more obviously than often, so it is a useful 'unseen' to explore. As well as the lesson on PP and the fill in worksheet, there is a detailed note on Metre, using examples from the poem. Avoid with a weak class, but worth doing with a mid- to able class, provided the focus is on how the rhyme and rhythm support/ enhance meaning. The teacher's notes has two links, one to a reading of the poem and another to a youtube clip that could be used as a 'flipped learning' style preparatory homework task [under 20mins]: particularly useful with weaker students - an easy differentiation.

The culmination of the series focuses on question A6 following a similar pattern as before. It begins with a ‘quick-fire starter’ when the technique required by the question is practised in its simplest form, first on the PP, then with written texts. First, to give students confidence, two short texts from speeches on immigration. This keeps the time pressure on so that working quickly becomes a habit. Then the question requirements are explored through the exam board’s directives and again quick and easy examples with answers build up to more demanding practise through the series. Visual texts and Extracts of both 19th century and 21st century texts are used in the series to ensure students are undaunted by older texts. In all cases answers and a simplified mark scheme are provided.

It might not seem like much if you don’t follow the links, but this is the portal to the world of unseen poetry! This booklet will save you and your students hours of trawling the Internet. My thanks to Caro Evans, my colleague and friend who asked me to compile this list and selected the poems- we decided that the most logical way to prepare for the unseen element of the exam was to look at other poems by the studied poets, to give students an idea of the context of the time and an ability to write about form and structure. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I’ve searched for information online and given you the links - so this works best as an e-book, where links can be easily copied and pasted. So this is something you can use for your own preparation and planning of unseen poetry - along with the sheet of possible comparison questions- or can mail to your students so that they can do their own exploring. There’s such a lot of treasure here to discover - Enjoy!

These resources cover chapters 18 to 21 and take a closer look at characterisation, allusion, structure and inference, making language analysis accessible to younger, less able students, boys with no former interest in literature as well as enthusiastic, more able readers. Answers enable peer and self-assessment. All the tasks are focused and succinct, assuming reading of the text will also be happening in the lesson. Some choice of activitiy is also offered for chapter 21.

If you’ve got to this point, you know what an excellent novel this is, ideal for short reading extracts and lots of teaching opportunities. This set of resources offers teacher notes to help with planning and pacing your lessons. Tasks cover characterisation, vocabulary, imagery and structure. While tasks are aimed at younger or weaker readers in the main, the skills taught are aimed at building a profound understanding of crafting and ‘active reading’. Links are made to students’ own writing, improving writing skills from literary devices to SPaG. Throughout the series skills are revisited to inculcate them via different tasks. Answers are provided and most tasks are self-or peer assess.

This third set of resources covers chapters 9-13 and a note to the teacher outlines how each of the resources can be used. Chapter 9 is a creative writing task that revisits structure: all the words from a description at the start of the chapter have been placed in alphabetical order and students create there own images from these words. Discussion can then move to justifying the choices and from thence to Segdwick’s description as students read the chapter. Information from Chapters 10 & 11 is retrieved and summarised for a police report on Einar’s intended robbery, while chapter 12 leads to a debate on guns, introduced by a PP. Chapter 13’s worksheet returns the focus to imagery, close reading and analysis by looking at a brief description and picking out key words.

A bundle in itself, this resource has 13 units to it. Teachers’ notes on each chapters resources navigate you through the exciting end of this great novel. Homework, starters, main lessons and assessments with answers cover similes, persuasive S&L as well as writing, mystery solving and taking life-lessons from literature. Activities range from debating to poster making via questions, intuitive leaps [signalled] inference and formulating an opinion. In chapter 34, for example, the starter introduces a learning question, answers to which are found during the lesson through reading the chapter and the plenary and homework address formulating an answer as an essay.

All these starters are designed to build students' vocabulary, familiarising them with words, getting them to build words and helping them to choose apt vocabulary: the right word in the right place. All are self-check, with clear answers that enable self- and peer assessment, minimising your workload. All have an element of differentiation in a worksheet option. Each is available separately as part of the 'Word-hoard series 1' starters, but as a bonus, all 6 are available here, so you get one free!

Here is everything you need for a fun media project - get your students making a montage. This is aimed at yr9s who will be doing a Media GCSE, so gives them a flavour of projects to come and is ideal for the end of the year. Although most will want to film, it is possible to deliver a montage on Power Point, so all skill and interest levels are accommodated. There are 6 lessons with instruction slides, links to lots of clips showing montages as well as tutorials for use at home. The note to the teacher guides you through the scheme and the montage outline gives students their instructions and due dates [you fill those in]. As well as a project review sheet to flag up problems, there is a self- and peer- assessment sheet for when the montages are done.

There are three sets of homophones here. In each case students first get the handout and learn the homophones as homework. Later they do the relevant exercise and use the answers to mark their own or a partner's work, which can be done as a starter. The exercise tests their knowledge of the homophones, but could also be set as another day's homework - useful if you're under pressure to set homework at a busy time and need something worth doing yet easy to mark [just check peer marking if required]. In addition, because students learn best by re-visiting work, there is also a test for each of the sets of homophones, also with answers. This work is best done drip-fed over a term or two. Use the miscellaneous homophone handout as an extension exercise when needed: students can make up their own 'test' sentences using them as a guide, to test one another.

Here are the three different stages leading up to and including the trial exam paper and its feedback. The focus is on learning a strategy for coping with unseen poetry by taking it slowly, focusing on the process while exploring the poems: 'Sonnet 65' and 'Meeting at Night' and comparing the two.

Ideal as homework or cover, these self-mark worksheets each give some brief information relevant to the poem and set three tasks, for which there are answers on the second page. If done in class, students can work in groups and then peer assess other groups, giving you a bit of breathing space! Perfect for embedding poems after class exploration. A-level students needing to brush up their poetry revision pre-exams would benefit from the tasks too. Covers the 1st eight poems in the AQA anthology.