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.

GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS: Accent Adjacency pairs Back-channel features Blend word Contraction Deixis / deictics Dialect Discourse markers Elision Ellipsis False start Fillers Hedge Idiolect Interactional talk Initialism Jargon Micropause Non-fluency features Overt prestige Paralinguistic features Phatic talk Prosodic features Received Pronunciation Repairs Slang Sociolect Standard English Tag question Transactional talk Transcript Turn taking Utterance Vague language 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.

'Pass the Buck' Students explore Belfast Confetti in a fun and engaging way by working in small groups and answering questions about the poem. The questions encourage students to analyse the poem from a different angle and consider small details in the poem. Divide students into six groups. Give each group a question on a piece of sugar paper. They will have 2 minutes with each question. They are to jot down as many ideas as possible in response to the question, but they can’t repeat what has already been written. Allow 8 minutes at the end of the task for students to present their sugar paper. Other groups must annotate their poem with the key ideas they hear. Explain that they don’t have to write everything down, but they should write down relevant points that help their own understanding.

This lesson takes students through how to respond to an exam question. The question is: Starting with this speech, explain how far you think Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman. Write about: • how Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth in this speech • how Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth in the play as a whole Students explore the play where Lady Macbeth is featured. They highlight/annotate the exam question and speech. They then read through other parts of the play and pick out important quotations for their 'quotations' bank. Students also complete a PEE-based essay plan throughout the lesson in preparation for writing a whole response. Students also consider the assessment objectives. On the PowerPoint there are 'notes' at the bottom of each slide for guidance on how to conduct the lesson.

This resource contains a PPT and a selection of poems for students to practise approaching unseen poetry. The PPT guides students through the following: 1. Title 2. Shape/form 3. Personal response 4. Voice 5. Vocabulary 6. Imagery 7. Structure 8. Interpretation Encouraging students to look at these aspects of a poem will enable them to engage and understand the unseen poem.

Students I've taught struggle to remember key quotations. I wracked my brains to try and find a way to help them remember without just learning by rote and repetition. This activity was particularly successful with my students. Print the carefully selected quotations with their short explanation and issue to students. You may wish to print 2-3 times to give students 3 quotations each. Ask each student on a sticky note to illustrate the quotation. Albeit simple, this activity really helps students to recall quotations as they remember the illustration they do. Allow students to use colour as it makes the activity for memorable. An alternative activity may be to give each student one quotation each and an A4 piece of paper. Ask them to illustrate the quotation on a larger scale, using colour, and then make a class display which the whole class can refer to.

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.

Using this sheet, students map the rise and fall of Macbeth. They look at phrases used to describe Macbeth in the play. They must find evidence for each phrase. Once finished, this worksheet will illustrate - using quotations - the tragic downfall of Macbeth throughout the play.

Students are asked the question: Is Macbeth Evil? Based on their simple 'yes' or 'no' response, they are split into two teams: prosecuting team and defence team. You - the teacher - are the judge. Teams are initially given their 'first piece of evidence' (an extract) to analyse and annotate with their agenda/argument in mind. They are then asked to look at the 'play as a whole' to find other pieces of evidence to support their argument. A mock court case is then held with Macbeth on trial. Both teams present their cases and debate whether or not Macbeth is evil. The teacher - playing the role of the judge - then weighs up the arguments and makes a decision. For homework, students are given the same question which has been formalized into an exam question. This is a fun and exciting way of exploring an exam question which allows students to really get their teeth into a question. All lesson guidance is in the 'notes' section on each slide on the PowerPoint. This lesson is about encouraging students to develop a 'critical, exploratory, well-structured argument' which is at the top of level 6.

This is a resource to coincide with a unit of worked based on teaching the history of the English language. It is a dictionary for Lincolnshire Dialect. There is a lot of scope with this resource, e.g students could find out different versions of the word in alternate dialect. Or, alternatively, students write a play script in Lincolnshire Dialect - often with hilarious consequences, and mostly including farmers. Students then perform their plays which could become a speaking and listening assessment.

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 PPT looks at three different responses to: In Of Mice and Men explore the ways the writer presents relationships between characters. LENNIE AND CURLEY’S WIFE Focusing specifically on AO3: Read and understand texts, selecting material appropriate to purpose Develop and sustain interpretation of writers’ ideas and perspectives Explain and evaluate how writers use linguistic, grammatical, structural and presentational features to achieve effects and engage and influence the reader. There is a grade D/E response, a grade C response and a B/A response. Students are able to see how they can improve and develop their analysis to achieve higher grades. There's also a comprehensive and detailed essay plan to aid students' planning of a response to the exam question above.

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.

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!

Issue 'Shakespeare Prologue' to pairs. Students work through the prologue as if they are detectives deciphering a piece of evidence. They must 'zoom in' on individual words, decipher their meaning and try piece together what the entire prologue actually means and what is going to happen in the play. Allow students 20 minutes to do this before discussing the prologue and finally handing them 'Prologue Explained' which is the prologue translated into modern English. Albeit simple, students love the detective element to this activity. It really helps to engage them.

Students are asked to analyse a short piece of dialogue between a teacher and student. They are to 'zoom' in on the language and focusing specifically on words, e.g. the difference between the words 'chat' and 'discussion'.

When I first met my new classes I went through a 'classroom code' so they were familiar with my expectations. This is the PowerPoint I used. You may edit it as you wish to suit your own purposes.

Students sometimes use the word ‘of’ where they should use the world ‘have’. This may be because the shortened version of ‘have’ sounds like ‘of’. Students learn about the common error as described above, before correcting sentences.