Small Island - AS Teaching Pack

A pack designed to teach the entirety of Andrea Levy’s Small Island to students in Y12 preparing for the Cambridge AS International Examinations in 2019.

A comprehensive, detailed scheme of work is included to give an overview to this teaching pack, explaining for each lesson the section of the novel being covered, the learning objective, the lesson activities, the learning outcome and any feed-forward/homework to be completed.

However, lessons generally progress chronologically throughout the whole novel and are each designed to teach:

• comprehension of plot and character
• contextual detail
• significant themes
• key quotations and analysis
• language techniques
• essay writing skills

Students are encouraged to reflect on critical approaches to the novel, particularly post-colonial and feminist interpretations, as well as the contextual factors influencing its creation and reception. Students were expected to have read the whole novel before teaching started, which is why the introductory lessons begins with a quiz, but this can easily be used at the end of the unit instead. While students read independently, they were given bookmarks with key contextual vocabulary and language techniques to encourage research and reflection at home.

Two workbooks cover a close study of the end of the novel - we found these necessary for relief lessons, but they could be used for homework, reinforcing students’ understanding, or for revision.

There are also quite a lot of other revision resources included in this pack as well, such as cloze activities, practice exam questions, exemplar essays, quizzes and quote sheets. I’ve also included some extra reading resources that can be given to students for homework, cover lessons or extension tasks.

Note: We used the BBC adaptation to reflect on some of the key events (and images from the film are therefore included as prompts), but this differs quite significantly from the novel, and isn’t necessary to access the teaching materials within this pack.