This lesson is aimed at GCSE/iGCSE students and has a choice of writing tasks. One of them is a bit silly (writing to granny about your potential inheritance) but the other is a realistic GCSE style question. It has all the basics of letter writing.

This lesson works with a GCSE-style transactional writing tasks with the subject of boarding schools. I’ve written quite a lot of exemplar material for it and it includes a bit on proof-reading.

Useful resource for thinking about epigrams in The Importance of Being Earnest

This double page has a summary of ways to write a good creative writing assessment as well as a couple of tasks. It produced great work.

This lesson guides students through the way early novels were titled and imitated travellers’ tales. There’s a comprehension exercise on an extract and a creative task.

This lesson suggests ways for students to improve transactional writing through considering the audience, intended structure, varied vocabulary and punctuation and sentence types. Students need a previous piece of work to edit for the lesson.

This lesson has lots of examples of differing tone in transactional writing and suggests ways for students to adapt their writing tone for transactional writing tasks. It includes a task, written from notes provided.

Useful context about the theatrical world Wilde wrote for, contemporary stereotypes and ideas, genres and influential plays.

This lesson suggests themes and context to go with the study of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Lesson on writing dialogue that sounds real and is funny. Was originally based on a family meal extract from ‘Black Swan Green’ by David Mitchell, so do use that if you can! I removed it for copyright reasons.

A powerpoint to do a Whoosh activity with a class about the overall plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

This lesson (written spring 2023) has a list of the genres used in the Edexcel iGCSE transactional writing questions up to June 2022 and suggests students consider what patterns they can see and focus their revision and practice accordingly. It also includes some past questions to plan as a revision technique.

This is the final lesson in my mini-unit on The Story of an Hour. It’s helpful to have used the previous lessons on women in 19th century literature, annotating The Story of an Hour and prose structural features.

As Out of the Bag is long, I’ve divided it into 2 lessons. Here’s the first. For use teaching the poems of the decade collection for Edexcel

Lesson on Burnside’s poem History from the Edexcel A Level collection poems of the decade

Here’s a first lesson based on the opening of Heart of Darkness. It starts with a freewriate based on word from the beginning of the novel, then asks students to consider the context and ends with reflection on how the freewriting helped to understand those first pages. The rest of my scheme of work is available on TES.

This scheme of work on Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen contains 7 core lessons plus a couple of of revision lessons. It includes context and critical material as well as ideas for analytical essays. It will need adapting for whatever your syllabus is but contains lots of lovely stuff on: creating the heroine, character sketching, parodies of the Gothic and the ways lies are used in the plot. There are quite a few EMC articles, including one I wrote on fashionable words used in the novel.

From ‘A Game of Polo with a headless goat’ has not been used for a while on the Edexcel iGCSE exam, so may well be the one in summer 2024. A basic lesson on the non-fiction text, telling students what technical features to look for in annotating. My own notes on the text A lesson on how to approach Q5 with Game of Polo and a text about unusual sports. There are no written exemplars in this pack and it is aimed at fairly high ability students.