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 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.
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.
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.
GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS:
Alliteration
Assonance
Enjambment
Content
Emotive language
Form/
Structure
Imagery
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
End-stopped line
Rhyme
Simile
Stanza
Tone
Voice
Symbol
Rhythm
Personification
Mood
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.
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
Place these facts around the room. Students have five minutes to search for the facts in the room and write them down. Allow time to feed back and discuss afterwards.
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.
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.
Using the PowerPoint, explain to students the three main types of newspaper writing – news stories, features and opinion pieces.
Students should make notes in their books as you explain to them.
Quick test (slide 6): Ask students to decide whether the headlines are for news, features or opinion pieces. They should explain what clues helped them, e.g. the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’
Issue the three Articles to pairs. Students are to decide which one is the news story, the feature article and the opinion piece.
Students are to read the articles closely. Under the headings of ‘news stories’ ‘features’ and ‘opinion pieces’ in their book, students are to identify word level features in the different types of writing. Display slide 7 on the PowerPoint to assist students. But encourage students to be open-minded about what the find. Differentiation: some features will need explaining. For lower ability groups, delete tricky features as appropriate.
After activity, ask students to explain what language features they're likely to find in a features article/news story/opinion piece?
This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism 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.
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.
A simple straight-forward starter for capital letters. Students learn where to use capital letters before correcting sentences where capital letters have not been used.
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.
L.O.: To understand the content and context of Elvis’s Twin Sister.
Assess: Students’ ability to: listen carefully to factual information about Elvis’s life; understand how humour is used to achieve particular effects.
This resource includes a comprehensive lesson plan and PowerPoint to successfully teach students the poem Elvis's Twin Sister.
This exam question PEE plan is applicable to all questions on AQA's English Literature Paper 1. It allows a space for the question, and then separates it off into the two bullet points, then allowing students space to plan their PEE paragaphs.
Students find this plan very clear and simple to use. It allows them to organise their thoughts and plan a coherent exam response.
Ask your students to graph the build-up of tension in each act. Differentiation would include asking students to add quotes to their graph or illustrate pictures to help their understanding.
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.