This is a Monopoly-style board game aimed at teaching KS3 and KS4 about Shakespeare's life, times, works and general context. It will get them asking (and answering) lots of questions, and will lead to increased knowledge of: Shakespeare's home life and family; His theatres, colleagues and patrons; The different genres of play he wrote; Some key quotations. The set works just like Monopoly but without the money. It includes PDFs of a board, property cards, the equivalents of Chance and Community Chest, and some trivia questions in place of income tax. I've added a guide lesson plan (which includes how to play the game). The 'property cards' instead of being areas of London are aspects of Shakespeare's life and works There are also four squares on the board that allow you to make it specific to a particular play if needed. I have added some questions on Richard III to show how this works.

This is a Year 9 / KS4 mixed-ability lesson which introduces students to the animal imagery in 'Of Mice and Men'. It is focused primarily on Chapters One and Two. It includes a starter, introductory activity, main activity and plenary. All worksheets, resources, lesson outline and powerpoint are included. The lesson is very activity-based, and is designed to promote independent discovery of the animal themes in the book via role-playing, picture-matching and quote-hunting.

If your students keep producing images along the lines of 'The boy ran as fast a cheetah' (yawn) then this might be the lesson for you. It's geared towards helping them create original and relevant metaphors and similes. The impact on my students has been palpable and immediate, and my colleagues have now all adapted the lesson for their own classes. It contains a powerpoint, a differentiation sheet (which actually works for everyone), and an additional starter sheet. It fits with a dystopia unit, but I've also adapted it for mystery/horror with Year 8s (also available on tes.com). Good luck!

This is a complete, 6-lesson Scheme of Work designed for a Year 7 class. It introduces them to the basic concept of language change and covers, in a fun way, the development of English over the last thousand years. The lessons cover: 1) historical overview, 2) Adverts ancient and modern, 3) how words have changed meaning, 4) Beowulf and Old English, 5) Kennings, 6) Shakespeare and finally an Assessment lesson. Each lesson pack includes a lesson plan, all resources and a powerpoint. There are notes on differentiation, learning objectives and suggested homework projects for every lesson. Some of the elements have been gleaned and altered from resources originally devised by brilliant teachers I have come across either in real life or online; others have been created from scratch by myself. All have been moulded into a coherent course that I delivered with great success in 2017.

If your students keep producing images along the lines of 'The boy ran as fast a cheetah' (yawn) then this might be the lesson for you. It's geared towards helping them create original and relevant metaphors and similes. The impact on my students has been palpable and immediate, and my colleagues have now all adapted the lesson for their own classes. It contains a powerpoint, a differentiation sheet (which actually works for everyone), and an additional starter sheet. It fits with a mystery/horror unit, but I've also adapted it for dystopia with Year 9s. Good luck!

This is an introduction to war poetry aimed at Year 7 students or low-ability Year 8. The aim of the lesson is to get the students thinking about the human cost of war, in preparation for looking at specific texts in later lessons. There are several activities, including a sorting task focused on numbers of dead, a sequence of photos to discuss, and a writing task pretending to be a soldier writing a letter home. The activity I found most powerful was the class poem creation, building up their own war poem out of word suggestions. At the start of the lesson the students came up with words like ‘fight’, ‘blood’, ‘cannon’. But when the exercise was repeated at the end they were suggesting words like ‘tired’, ‘homesick’, ‘scared’. They were amazed at their own creation. The lesson plan gives a brief outline of how to go through the lesson. The ‘What is War’ PPT takes you through the process, and the ‘World War 1 images and music’ PPT (which I found somewhere - maybe on TES) is a separate piece to play through in the main section of the lesson. I suggest using the slideshow mode (f5) so that the music and animations all play automatically.

I devised this lesson for a Year 8 group that contained a large proportion of students with special needs. It could be adapted for mixed ability or a Year 7 group quite easily. I decided to work with the WW1 song ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’ as it is a simpler way in to the topic than full-on Wilfred Owen, but it still resonates powerfully for audiences today. The students responded well to the repetition in the text, and also to the singing, which they joined in with. The aim of the lesson is to introduce students to the idea of war as a metaphor for societal inequality. It uses a lot of questions, answers and discussion to get the students to ponder pre-conceived notions about war and army ranks. It ends in a differentiated writing task. I found it very effective.

This is a 20-lesson scheme of work that I devised for Year 9 and Year 10 students. It includes powerpoints for every lesson, resources, homework and differentiation, as well as interim and final assessments. I’ve also included some ‘use-anywhere’ extra lessons such as one for the students to do at home if there’s a snow day, and one which is purely an acting workshop (based on a day I spent at the Globe). As you’ll see, the lessons focus primarily on different scenes, working through the play. To accompany the lessons, I used a DVD of the Shakespeare’s Globe production starring Eve Best and Charles Edwards for close analysis. I recommend this as it is both clear and very accessible. To introduce the play before we started detailed work on it, I showed the students Kenneth Branagh’s film, which is shorter and great fun. I should add that some of the lessons are entirely of my own invention, some are compiled from existing resources, and some are a genuine mixture. I trawled through dozens of resources while putting the scheme together. I have deliberately avoided pinning every element of this course to Assessment Objectives in the GCSE specifications. Instead I have taken a more organic approach to appreciating the play. Nevertheless, students who engage with this course will be very well prepared to approach GCSE in years 10 and 11. This scheme has been shared across the English department, and has been found to be very effective.

This lesson enables students to understand the difference between, on the one hand, jumping to a random conclusion about a text and, on the other, attempting to understand and explain what the text may mean. It can be used either a starter discussion or, with the worksheet, as a main activity. Furthermore, it can be repeated with other example pieces of text on future occasions. It begins by getting students to consider what is meant by the terms ‘conjecture’ and ‘analysis’, and which might be more valuable in reading texts. Then it gives them an exercise in which they try to organise a group of statements from most conjectural to most analytical. I found, after doing this exercise a couple of times, that my students became much more aware of the pitfalls of jumping to random conclusions when trying to understand their set texts and unseen poems.

This lesson helps students examine Shakespeare’s comedic techniques in Act 2 scene 5 of ‘Twelfth Night’. It is aimed at mixed ability Year 8, but with a little alteration (eg less scaffolding) could be adapted up to Year 10. It focuses on comedy based in: situation character exaggeration inversion imagery irony bawdiness NB the bawdiness is quite rude! Delete as appropriate. You could swap the joke about ‘Cs, Us and Ts’ for a less offensive one, such as Malvolio referring to ‘playing with my… some rich jewel.’