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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Poetic devices glossary to assist with students' study of poetry.

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.