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.
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
Two lessons that teach students all about Shakespeare's sonnets, their structure, rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter. Packed with interactive activities, including lots of drumming with hands on the desk!
The learning objectives are as follows:
WALT: identify the structure and rhyme scheme of a sonnet.
WALT: explore another of Shakespeare’s sonnets to take inspiration from to write my own.
These two lessons lead students up to writing their own sonnet as a writing assessment.
Students to correct these commonly mixed-up idioms. This activity could lead into a lesson about the origin of idioms and why idioms are part of the English language.
This resource takes students through the process of reading and understanding an exam question. It encourages students to look closely at the wording and dissect the question before they even consider answering it. All too often students glance at the question and make a start on the answer. This resource helps students see why it's so important to really engage with the question. You can swap the questions on the PPT and activity with exam questions that are relevant to what your class is studying.
This bundle of starters includes activities on:
Homophones
Unstressed Vowels
Connectives
Capital Letters
'Have' instead of 'Of'
Plurals
Simple/Compound/Complex Sentences
Close-reading & Inference
Idioms
Buying these starters separately would cost £2 each, but you get 11 starters for £7.50, saving 66%.
Do ‘Starter Activity for Descriptive Writing’; this should put students in the right mind-set for descriptive writing. This activity should encourage students to tune into their senses, which is an essential skill for writing descriptively. Ideally, students should use mini whiteboards, but if these are not available, then exercise books are satisfactory.
Hand-out ‘An Example of Writing to Describe’ sheet. Ask students, in pairs, to read it through and highlight – in different colours – the words and sentences that relate to the five senses. Recap the five senses – sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Feedback. Ask students why description is important.
Hand-out ‘Planning Sheet for Descriptive Writing’. Explain that, as it is a planning sheet, it does not matter if they alter or change their ideas throughout. They are to write about a place or event, perhaps building on the ideas they established in the starter activity.
Students could write up their piece of descriptive writing as a writing assessment.
In this lesson students revisit the features of gothic stories before identifying them in an extract from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Students are then told that they'll be re-telling a popular nursery rhyme in the gothic genre. They are shown examples of Jack and Jill in the 'romance' genre and then the 'gothic' genre to give them an idea of how a nursery rhyme can be adapted. Students then choose and nursery rhyme and have a go themselves.
From personal experience, students absolutely love this activity and it really gets their creative juices flowing. It allows for very rich, high quality descriptive writing. This lesson is compatible with all abilities, but very successful with high ability KS3 students.
Work through the PowerPoint for the lesson which includes a starter activity, contextual information, 'crunched poem' activity (creative, language analysis), annotated poem, exam question and comparison activity. This could cover 1-2 lessons.
Issue the worksheet to students and ask them to identify whether the line comes from Shakespeare or a contemporary singer. After 5-10 minutes, go through the answers using the soundtrack to show which lines are from contemporary singers. The exercise proves to students that contemporary singers use similes, metaphors and other poetic techniques in the same way Shakespeare did.
Ask students to create a social network for the characters using this user-friendly sheet. On the characters' connecting lines write how the characters are connected. Around each character's face write key quotes and characteristics. An example is shown.
A printable classroom aid for students to use to remember the necessary language skills for writing to describe - SIMPLES, with each letter standing for a different language skill. I used this with my GCSE classes and it proved really helpful for the writing section of the AQA non-fiction exam - the meerkat helped!
GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS:
Alliteration
Emotive language
Tag line
Left side third
Cover line
Imperative
Superlative
Sky line
Pun
Masthead
Second person pronoun
Interrogative
Hyperbole
Central image
Use of numbers
Connotation
INSTRUCTIONS FOR ACTIVITY:
Cut out these dominoes and laminate them (optional). Give individuals or pairs one domino, including you, the teacher.
You begin by reading out the definition on the yellow side of your card. The student who has the term on the blue side of their card that matches with your definition then puts up their hand and says their term out loud. They then read aloud the definition on the yellow side of their card. All class members will have to listen carefully to see if their term matches with the definition they’ve just heard, and so the game continues until it goes full circle, every student has spoken, and you eventually hear the definition that matches with the term on the blue side of your card.
Essentially, you’re playing a large game of dominoes, where students have to match key terms with definitions they hear. Depending on your group’s knowledge/ability, you may work altogether to match up the terms with definitions, or, alternatively, you may decide to play this as an actual dominoes game on the floor.
This is a great 10-minute starter that really helps students to remember key terms and their definitions.
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?
Here's a fun plurals starter with a competitive element - bound to engage the boys!
In 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' style, this activity asks students to pluralise different words. As the monetary amount increases, the words get more and more difficult. For example, the £100 word is 'face', the £16,000 is 'goose', the £125,000 word is 'quiz' and the £1,000,000 is 'ox'. There are two versions of the game to play on two separate occasions; the second round takes students from 'house' (£100) to 'stimulus' (£1,000,000).
This is a fun, competitive starter that engages students in plurals - incredible!
This is a fun, dynamic lesson in which students are creative right from the start. They do a shared writing activity as a class before analysing an extract from John McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. This is an exemplary piece of descriptive writing entirely based on sounds. Students then start to plan their own piece of descriptive writing about a most loved or hated placed based entirely on sound. This then leads into students writing a descriptive piece about three paragraphs long that could be used as a writing assessment.
Students get into pairs. One partner must face the board, the other partner must face the back wall.
The partner facing the board must try to describe the poetic device without actually saying what it is. The partner must guess what that poetic device is before their facing partner can move onto the next word. Students then swap places to swap roles. This starter activity lasts approximately 10 minutes. Students, especially boys, enjoy the competitive element.
I've also enclosed a poetic device glossary which you may wish to hand out to students before or after the activity, depending on your group's ability, to recap some of the poetic devices.
As part of students' study of Anne Fine's play Flour Babies, they can adopt an egg to look after during the holidays.
You will need as many hard boiled eggs as you have students in the class to do this activity.
Students are talked through the adoption process before signing an official adoption certificate. Students are required to complete a 'baby book' to record their experiences. This obviously emulates what the characters have to do with a bag of flour in the play.
Issue Characteristics of a Shakespearean Hero to pairs. Read through. Students are to find evidence for the characteristics; some have been done for them.
After this activity, ask students: What is your personal response to Macbeth? Is he a likeable character? Do you feel sorry for him? Or do you think he deserves everything he gets?
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.