These lessons will have students prepared and confident for any assessment you give them! Great preparation for unseen poetry at GCSE.

Designed for my bottom set year 9 group who are learning about Victorian England and Romantic Poetry, these lessons became their final reading assessment. The activities are straightforward and engaging, the language is simple, yet asks them to reflect on their own expression and the final assessment has scaffolding including sentence openings and gap fills.

This lesson introduces students to the monster Cthulhu through pictures and a listening quiz using the parody song "Hey There Cthulhu". The lesson focus is on using impressive vocabulary, so there is a thesaurus race at the start and a cloze (gap filling exercise) to use new vocabulary in as well as a descriptive writing task. Nothing too spooky here, but enough to get students interested.

Are you falling asleep while marking your students' work? Whether descriptive or narrative, these resources are designed to help get those uninspired writing to the next level, making their work imaginative and engaging to read. I used them initially with a top set GCSE group, but quickly started rolling them out all the way down to year 7 low ability (high expectations are the key!). Each lesson has specific outcomes with resources for students to self or peer assess so they can see their progress. There are 7 complete lessons which deal with vocabulary building, word connotations, sentence structure, paragraphing, planning, etc. I found my students' marks went up by as much as two grades by using these key ideas and students who found it hard to be creative before had the confidence to take much better risks with their work and enjoy the process. I felt like I'd discovered a secret of some kind with these ideas and I hope you feel the same.

I hate spoon-feeding Shakespeare to students. Shakespeare deserves better! This unit of work is for GCSE and focuses on the first three acts of The Merchant of Venice. It is designed to give background information and close reading practice in order to build up to an essay on audience sympathy for the character of Shylock. The last scene with Shylock in (Act 4, scene 1) was then given for independent analysis and students watched different versions of the trial scene before writing that paragraph in class in controlled conditions. This gave me a chance to see them move from more structured group and whole class work to their personal, independent ability. Their essay results were excellent and the range of approaches to the question really paid off with a wide range of different answers, quotations chosen and analysis of language. In this unit you will find a range of interactive games, PowerPoint presentations and note-making worksheets suitable for students from D to A*

A complete lesson with resources to support students answering an iGCSE style essay question (although it would be easily adapted to another curriculum). The focus is on the techniques used to present the farmhand’s thoughts and feelings. There are pre-differentiated worksheets to support different abilities. There is also a line by line analysis essay, which is not the CIE’s preferred method. You could use this pretty solid 7 or 8 essay and change the structure to thematic and create a grade 9 essay. There are questions to guide the students first through fourth readings covering vocabulary, imagery, structure and meaning. I have also provided a biographical page and made clear links between Baxter’s life and the setting and character created in Farmhand. There are a choice of starters and plenaries or these could become a secondary lesson with time for students to write their full essays. Please feel free to message me with comments or requests. Lizzee

Hi! This is a complete set of resources to teach Muliebrity by Sujata Bhatt. This poem is on the iGCSE curriculum as part of the SOngs of Ourselves anthology. I’ve included everything I would want to put on each slide including dates, titles, LOs, and detailed analysis of language and structure for each part. There are biographical details and context slides as well as the BBC news article to introduce some of the concepts to students and there are plenty of games/activities to learn new vocabulary either in the poem or useful to describe the poem. The final lesson assessment has an exam style question about the girl in Muliebrity which is broken down, planning is provided, as are sentence starters, paragraph success criteria, a mark scheme, self- or peer-assessment slides and a reflective plenary as well. There should be more than enough for a lesson here so you can come back to some of the activities for revision. Enjoy!

A baker's dozen of revision creative tasks and activities. Little to no preparation time needed. These are student-focused, varied for different abilities and to keep students engaged. These make the student work hard, not you. These would form either the main focus of a lesson or part of a carousel of activities which students tackle over the lesson. They could also be set as homework tasks with opportunity to feedback in the following lesson. These are revision tasks, so students should have already read the book and discussed the themes and issues.

FIVE different activities to help students refresh their memories of the characters, events and quotations from The Secret River. These could be spread out over several lessons or combined into a couple. Students should have their own copies of the books, but there is no specific need for them here. I would suggest using these in the first week of revision. They are enjoyable, engaging, team activities with a bit of something for every learning style. Some notes on using the resources: Answers are provided for all of the quizzes on the same PPT. Cut up the dominoes beforehand because they are currently in the correct order. The pictures are taken from the TV mini-series, but should be obvious even if the students haven't seen it. The only ones who seem a little nondescript are Dan and Ned. Enjoy!

This resource pack is aimed at helping students analyse the text in close detail for a passage question and to structure that kind of response, and at students who will tackle a whole-book essay question. There are some activities which focus on Grenville herself and the information is provided for students along with some active reading challenges. This background information then links into a lesson helping students develop an empathetic response and a question on where our sympathies as readers lie. It succinctly takes them through the steps of structuring sentences, paragraphs and the whole response. There are clear objectives for each task, breaking down the C grade descriptors and A grade descriptors and helping students push themselves to the next grade. Best of luck to all of you guiding students through iGCSEs! I'm sure they will be a credit to you!

These resources focus on essay writing skills and revising knowledge of characters in an active game (though this could be done with students just writing notes on each character - feel free to adapt it to your needs). There is essay writing guidance including grade C and grade A mark scheme, colour-coding revision of essay paragraphs and an interactive plenary with a venn diagram for students to place themselves on. These are resources which will challenge every student to take part. They are easily adaptable for any essay question. These work really well in conjunction with the other resource packs I have for sale. The PowerPoint has been re-uploaded from the working copy I have.

Designed to teach Wilfred Owen's Anthem For Doomed Youth and Seigfried Sassoon's Attack, this bundle is full of structured 4 or 5 part lessons with differentiated outcomes and activities, varied to keep every student engaged and challenged, making excellent progress. Whether analysing these poems for CIE iGCSE Songs of Ourselves, Unseen Poetry or WW1 Poetry, they are accessible for KS3 and KS4 and lead to structured and scaffolded essay responses suitable for exam preparation or coursework. It includes a whole lesson contextualising WW1 and analysing the language of recruitment posters persuading soldiers to enlist. This is a great way to have students thinking critically and engaged from the first moment! The following lesson goes on to challenge students to compete to read and answer questions on the two poets through their biographies. This is a really fun strategy to get them reading and can get really competitive! Students have never failed to empathise with these two soldier-poets who wrote about their experiences on the front line and the reflection afterwards has created some very rewarding responses. The next lesson is a full lesson of analysis in the form of a snooker game. Students will be active, working independently and pushing themselves, but won't even notice how much hard work they're doing! All you have to do is sit back and check their answers as they bring them up! This lesson has always gone down so well with the students and I achieved an Outstanding in a lesson observation with it too: I'm really excited to pass it on to you! Finally, I have included an example of a student's war poetry essay for iGCSE (on two different poems) so students can see a modelled example of how to structure their responses and get to act as the teacher and mark an anonymous piece of coursework. Everything you need to study these poets and poems is here in one place. Enjoy!

A complete lesson on chapter 6 of No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe. This lesson has sentence level analysis for students to complete as well as starter, timeline, questions on each passage from chapter 6, practice for essay writing with mark scheme and plenary. Just project and go!

A full lesson on chapter 7 of No Longer at Ease. The lesson objective is about themes in the novel as a whole and the starter, questions for each passage and main lesson activity all relate back to the themes. Don’t worry! Lots of my students need a little reminder of what themes actually are too, so there’s an interactive game to play at the beginning as well. Enjoy!

Lucky for some! Part 13 focuses on structural and language features as well as analysing the two poems included in this chapter. I have included these two poems on a separate worksheet. This could be blown up to A3 for group work or each student could write their own notes on this A4 version. The lesson begins with a game of structural/language features. The questions relate the language and structure to the themes of the novel and the development activity asks students to find quotations to find support for the points being made abut language and structure in chapter 10. The students could then pick one or two P+E to turn into full paragraphs. Enjoy!

This complete lesson is focused on Achebe’s use of intertextuality in No Longer at Ease. The usual guided reading questions are provided after a starter on different text types and then the development activity is to finish writing a paragraph about Obi’s references to other literature or sayings which I have started for them. Enjoy!

This lesson is a revision focused lesson apart from a guided reading of chapter 11 of No Longer at Ease. The starter is a game of Taboo to help students revise key character names. After the usual guided reading with questions, students are asked to come up with their own questions on NLAE. These progress in difficulty, At the end of the lesson, swap each team’s questions (make sure you’ve kept a strict eye on the questions they come up with so they are easy enough to answer in a couple of sentences) and then each group will compete to answer all the questions and get to the finish first. This puts all of the effort on to the students and you will be able to just stamp their answers as you check them. Enjoy!

This complete lesson on chapter 14 of No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe focuses on closely analysing quotations from the text. There is a modeled example of close language analysis.I have also included links to the TED talk and an accompanying pdf transcript by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on The Danger of a Single Story of Africa. Her talk closely mirrors some of Achebe’s themes and an interesting “conversation” between the tauthors wo could be imagined and/or hotseated if you have time.

This lesson focuses on the changing relationship between Clara and Obi. There is a highly scaffolded diary entry to be completed by students if necessary as well as group work with roles provided in addition to the usual complete lesson from starter, guided reading of chapter 9, development activity and plenary. Enjoy!

A complete lesson on chapter 9 of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. There is a wordsearch with suggested differentiated options of how to offer it to students. The words should be challenging to every student. The next lesson will include a spelling test on some of these words - so there’s the students’ homework :).