<p>This resource is aimed at year 7 with the intention of building familiarity and a foundation for poetry and other skills that will be required to flourish at GCSE. Here you will find a complete unit (ten lessons). The main premise is that students get used to having an anthology whereby they study a selection of poems and begin to compare the ideas and techniques of the different poets provided. This will help to build skills for comparing poetry but is also geared initially to secure confidence in dealing with unseen poetry. For variety, there are other tasks included which are beneficial for other GCSE skills such as creative writing and the non-fiction language paper. The resource is written with AQA GCSE in mind (exams starting 2017) however the scheme is fully viable for all exam boards. The resources you will find is a full programme of study, PowerPoints for every lesson, worksheets and the anthology itself which includes background information on the poets, as well as the poems themselves (or, due to copyright reasons, the location of poems online).</p> <p>The scheme covers five poems (William Blake/The Tyger, Alfred Lord Tennyson/The Eagle, Lewis Carroll/The Crocodile, Roald Dahl/The Pig, and Edwin Morgan /Hyena) allowing students to experience poetry from the C19th and C20th. Each lesson is accompanied by a PowerPoint mapping the lesson for both teachers and students, step by step. The PowerPoints include all of the information documented in the programme of study; this means that the lesson is instantly ready to go. The scheme is also fully resourced with accompanying worksheets and some useful website links where appropriate. Each lesson also has homework ideas, many of them have various options. Although the homework fits with the learning agenda of the lesson, they are not essential to the continuation of lessons and therefore homework can be selected as regularly as is appropriate for your timescales, homework policy and ability of students. I know that many schools operate with a homework timetable and therefore, as there are optional homeworks for every lesson, the scheme should be able to complement these timetables and school needs.</p> <p>The unit culminates into a final assessment whereby the students write a comparative essay. There are various written tasks throughout though that could be manipulated into assessments, should your department/school demand a greater number of assessment points.</p> <p>I have endeavoured to make the resource as varied as possible in order to engage, differentiate and target a number of skills. The resource includes class discussion, group work, paired work, individual work, creative writing, analytical writing and, of course, poetry investigation. I have also included as much self/peer marking as possible in the hope that this eases the teacher workload. Of course, no one size fits all and I hope at least you can adapt this resource to inspire your students.</p>

<p>This resource covers fifteen poets in order to support students and their poetry skills (Angelou, Auden, Blake, Cope, Frost, Hannah, Hardy, Harrison, Keats, Owen, Parker, Patten, Rossetti, Shapcott, Sheers,). As you can see the poets are varied and from different time periods. The resource is made up of 15 complete/full lesson plans and all of them are accompanied with PowerPoint presentations; the poems relevant to that lesson; background to the author; resources, suggested homework tasks; and differentiation opportunities. The resource also contains top tips for the exam/example essays.</p> <p>The aim of this resource:<br /> Ultimately, this resource is meant for English teachers to save on their planning and resource making time – they can literally pick up the resource and teach it to their GCSE class verbatim. Of course, the resource can simply be used for lesson ideas and edited accordingly, for example, the teacher may want to teach a different poem for that particular poet but they can still utilise the lesson and resource ideas. Likewise the resources can be edited accordingly. The lessons also are stand alone and therefore the order of the teaching can be to the teacher’s preference rather than the order given here; they are simply split into three logical groups here.</p> <p>The resource is aimed at higher level students. Nonetheless the resource could still be used for lowered ability students at key stage 4 - I have offered some differentiation opportunities to help the weaker students as well as stretch and challenge the more able. The scheme was written with GCSE in mind however, it could be utilised for a high ability KS3 class. Obviously poems can be interchanged as appropriate.</p> <p>There is a noticeable theme between the resources – for example the Power Points generally take the same shape: introducing objectives, looking at the background of the poet, looking at the poem and then introducing tasks. However, in the same breath, I have tried to make the scheme as varied as possible and I have included different ways of approaching poetry and teaching poetry. As an English teacher myself, I am only too aware of the danger of monotony when teaching a large string of poetry.</p> <p>The benefits of the resource:<br /> • Complete lesson plans.<br /> • Each lesson has a complementary PowerPoint.<br /> • Readymade resources.<br /> • Differentiated resources.<br /> • Teacher copies/answers<br /> • Model answers are included with annotations to highlight where an examiner might give marks.<br /> • Example exam style questions for students to try<br /> • Mark schemes<br /> • Top tips for handling unseen poetry<br /> • 174 pages of planning/information/resources<br /> • Gives the opportunity for students to experience 15 different writers and over 45 different poems.</p>