Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
L.O. To identify and understand emotive language, and its effect on readers.
The PowerPoint begins by asking students to look at two different headlines at a time and to decide which one is most emotive, and why. They then focus on two particular headlines and translate their ideas to paper by writing a PEE paragraph.
In the next activity, they then have a go at editing a series of headlines by replacing words with more emotive words. Students should share ideas as an entire class.
Students then look at a newspaper article and underline/highlight the emotive words. They then complete a table whereby they think about 'more emotive' and 'less emotive' words than the ones in the article.
As a final activity, or as homework, students answer the following question about the newspaper article in PEE paragraphs:
How does the writer’s choice of emotive language make us (the readers) feel about the dog and its previous owners?
This will ultimately be a revision aid for students studying texts through a narrative lense. They are asked to break a text down into its narrative building blocks and create a summary for each narrative block. On the actual resource there are prompts for each building block to help elicit a response.
THE 7 NARRATIVE BUILDING BLOCKS:
SCENES AND PLACES
TIME AND SEQUENCE
CHARACTERS
VOICES IN THE STORY
POINT OF VIEW
DESTINATION
Students are issued with a scenario and asked to represent/show the story from the perspective of any of the people numbered 1-9. They must consider their perspective carefully. Ask themselves what can they see and hear? Write a short account; write in as much detail as your perspective allows.
This activity is a hands-on way of finding out how narrative perspective can alter the narration of a story. This will lend itself well to leading into a discussion about a narrator's point of view and reliability of narrators.
This is an excellent, fun and challenging quiz to do with secondary school students in an English lesson. This quiz tests students’ knowledge of children’s and teen literature. There are 52 opening lines - one for every week of the year - for students to try and identify. Students must decide which story the opening line comes from. Depending on your students’ ability, you can use the optional clues provided on each slide, available simply by clicking ‘clue’ on each slide. You can also challenge students to not only guess the story’s title but also the story’s author. There is plenty of scope for differentiation. Some notes for how to complete this activity are included in the ‘notes’ section the PowerPoint slides.
Sample opening lines:
“All children, except one, grow up.” - Peter Pan
"Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy." - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
“I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.” - Skellig
"My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue.” - Twilight
“Sophie couldn’t sleep. A brilliant moonbeam was slanting through a gap in the curtains. It was shining right on her pillow.” - BFG
The opening lines range from The Hungry Caterpillar to The Fault in our Stars. This quiz is a fun thing to do at Christmas or at the end of term, or just as part of a reading lesson to encourage students to read by engaging them in the opening lines.
This quiz also offers opportunity for students to discuss which opening lines are their favourites, perhaps encouraging them to seek out the stories to read for themselves.
This 23 slide PowerPoint (for teachers) contains 50+ FUN activities for students to do when reading novels as a class. These tasks really do engage, enthuse and excite, and they can be used with any age group. Look at the 'previews' to see the kind of activities on offer.
These activities really do jazz up 'reading' up students and gives them an active task when reading as a class.
This resource offers a comprehensive list of techniques used by the media to influence consumers. This list can be used in a variety of ways. Students could use it to identify techniques used in adverts or they could use it to create their own advert.
There are 15 different techniques listed:
Association
Bandwagon
Beautiful People
Bribery
Celebrities
Experts
Explicit Claims
Fear
Humour
Intensity
Maybe
Plain Folks
Repetition
Testimonials
Warm & Fuzzy
Students need to be in two teams. A volunteer from each team must come to the front. Volunteers must answer a series of questions to try cross the square vertically or horizontally. They’re allowed to ask for help from their team twice. They’re only allowed to choose one person to answer the question.
This resource includes a PowerPoint and a series of 18 questions with answers. Example of three questions below:
F – How do you spell Frankenstein?
C – Who is Frankenstein’s friend? Walton
I – In which city does Frankenstein live? Ingolstadt
Students are to review the play and consider reasons, with supportive quotations, as to whether or not Macbeth should kill King Duncan.
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Starter: Be active, not passive!
Display PowerPoint. Go through slides 1-3. Explain to students the difference between active and passive voice. Teach students the idea of bringing the subject to the front of the sentence in order to transmit meaning more clearly, directly and succinctly.
In this lesson students are going to put together a whole article individually or in pairs (depending on your group’s ability). Ideally, this should be done on laptops, but it’s possible to do on paper. You are going to feed students pieces of information via the PPT. Students will use the information to put their article together. Laptops are better for this activity as they are able to edit previously written paragraphs more efficiently.
For lower ability students, it’s probably best to print off the slides.
Explain task using slide 4. Show students slide 5-11, leaving about 5 minutes between each slide. For slide 10, you’ll need to print copies of the Article for pairs.
In the last five minutes, instruct students to check through their work using slide 12.
Students to swap their laptop with another pair and compare articles.
Show students Original Article. This is the actual article based on the same information published in 2008.
This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Of Mice and Men
Much of the plot in the novel is cyclical, as are the lives of the characters. The story opens and closes in the same place, the men’s lives are a routine of work - earn money - spend money in the flop-house - work, and many of the chapters begin and end in similar ways. There are lots of examples of foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck uses this technique to suggest that the characters couldn’t have avoided their fates – their destinies are inevitable.
The task this resource offers is for students to look below the surface of the text and interpret how Steinbeck is offering clues about what will happen later on in the novel. I am looking for some original responses.
This resource contains two documents: the student version is a blank table for students to complete; the teacher version is already filled in using Bridget Jones's Diary and When Harry Met Sally as examples.
Students are to attempt to identify the features of a romantic comedy in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and complete the table using modern romantic comedies to assist their understanding.
This resource offers a reading question, an essay plan and key word definitions. This essay was used as the reading assessment for a high ability Year 9 group studying Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Essay Question:
Starting with this speech, explain how far you think Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a tragic hero.
Assessment Objectives
A01 – Maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response, and use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations.
A02 – Analyse language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate
A03 – Show understanding of the contexts in which texts were written
A04 – Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation.
In this PPT are seven fantastic brain teasers. These will definitely get your tutees' brains whirring away.
For example:
What is light as a feather, but even the strongest man cannot hold it more than a few minutes?
Answer: His breath.
Two lessons based on Simon Armitage's poem November. The learning objective for both lessons is to understand the subject matter of November, and identify/interpret the feelings and attitudes.
These two lessons contain varied and exciting activities including sequencing activities, labelling the poem with pictures and relating the subject matter of the poem to themselves. There's a strong focus on the language of the poem and the different metaphors used.
The first sentence of an article (often printed in bold, or capitals, or a larger font) is called the topic sentence, as it introduces the main topic/subject of the article. It aims to give you the whole story in one go – who, what, where, why and when. Explain that it’s imperative that a writer is clear, concise and correct in their topic sentence.
Issue Topic Sentences to pairs of students. Ask them to write down the five Ws and see how many their topic sentence answers. Students will see how concise the topic sentence is, and what questions have been left unanswered. After 5 minutes, ask students to swap their topic sentence with another pair and do the same.
Discuss: How well were the topic sentences written? How could they have been improved?
(PW)
Display PowerPoint. Ask students to use the facts displayed to have a go at writing their own topic sentence. Show students the sentence written in the Daily Mail article (slide 3). Discuss how they’ve focused on the mother at the start of the sentence. Students to swap their topic sentences with a partner to see whether it answers the 5 Ws.
This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.
This is a collection of quotations about what poetry is. Place these around the room before students enter. Ask students to 'tour' the room and find the quotations. They're to write down what quotations most resonate with them. Ask students to explain what poetry is to them. If students 'hate poetry', may be suggest to them that musical lyrics also class as poetry and ask them to express what music means to them.
Issue 'Poem Analysis' and tell students that they're going to analyse a poem (cue students' inevitable groan). The 'poem' is really the lyrics from Eminem's and Rhianna's Love the Way you Lie, but DO NOT tell students this.
Allow students to analyse the 'poem'. They're to:
Underline the word/phrase you and your partner really like (you can do one each)
What is this poem about? How do you know?
What makes this a poem?
Underline and label things that make this a poem.
Discuss after students have had 10 minutes to analyse the poem and annotate it.
Without saying anything, just play the beginning of Eminem's and Rhianna's song and watch students' faces. They'll be amazed and suddenly quite engaged with poetry which they thought they hated. Lead into a discussion about how musical lyrics are a form of poetry. As an extension task, you could ask students to bring in their favourite musical lyrics and analyse them like a 'poem'.
A similar activity I've created is in my shop called:
KS3 Poetry Starter - Engaging Students Who 'HATE' Shakespeare - Shakespeare or Singer QUIZ
This PPT takes students through five stages of writing their own ballad. It uses the ballad 'Frankie & Johnny' to model the different features of a ballad. This is a creative writing task that could be used as a writing assessment.
Students learn what a kenning is and how it originated. They then look at some examples, guessing what the title of the kenning is. They then have a go at writing their own. This is a fun activity which engages students with Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry.
The SOW takes students through the following learning objectives:
Lesson 1
Obj: To be able to define ‘allegory’ and ‘satire’
Lesson 2
Obj: To be able to identify persuasive devices / To research the background and context of Animal Farm.
Lesson 3
Obj: To be able to identify language used for characters in Animal Farm
Lesson 4
Obj: To be able to identify differences between Snowball and Napoleon
Lesson 5
Obj: To be able to use knowledge of the content of Chapter 4 to plan newspaper article.
Lesson 6
Obj: To be able to identify improvements to be made through planning.
Lesson 7
Obj: To be able to understand how power and language are interlinked.
Lesson 8
Obj: To be able to understand how Animal Farm relates to Russian history.
Lesson 9
Obj: To be able to analyse and interpret events in Chapters 8 and 9
Lesson 10
Obj: To be able to identify what makes an effective speaker and listener.
Lesson 11
Obj: To be able to work effectively as a group and prepare a speech
Lesson 12
Obj: To be able to present speech and peer-assess
Lesson 13
Obj: To be able to analyse and discuss the film adaptation of Animal Farm
Lesson 14
To be able to analyse and discuss the film adaptation of Animal Farm