I’ve created this resource for my year 10 GCSE English Literature AQA group as a way to refresh their memories after the Christmas break. It’s a task they can get on with quietly in lesson if they need settling, or could be used for homework. There is a section underneath where they can score themselves when you go through the answers with them. I’ve not included answers, but do contact me if you need any support with providing answers. Hope it brings some calm to the chaos!

This resource has been created to help prepare students to take the AQA English Language Paper 1 exam. There are 5 practice papers using a variety of different and challenging texts. The extracts are marginally shorter than the actual exam extracts and some are from heritage texts. This has been done to facilitate a cross-over of skills between language and literature. The resource can be used in the classroom: modelling, conducting timed responses, or simply just talking through to expose students to as many texts as possible; or it could form an independent homework task, or revision. Without bigging myself up too much, I have been an AQA examiner for the past 3 years, so I hope that brings you some sense of trust in the usefulness of this resource. As ever, I hope this brings some calm to the chaos!

I recently produced this for my year 11 class as a way to revise the plot of ‘Macbeth’. It contains a short summary of each scene, and then a collection of key quotations from each scene. The resource is in table format and the final column is empty so that students can analyse each quotation. I modelled how to analyse each quotation for the first Act, and then I set the rest to be completed for homework. There is also a space for narrowing down quotations to just 10 key quotations as an additional homework task. This was successful in the classroom, and it’s given every student a solid base for revision of ‘Macbeth’. I hope it proves useful to you too.