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’

annotations for the iGCSE edexcel exam anthology text ‘Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on’

My annotations for the iGCSE exam anthology text ‘Between a rock and a hard place’

annotations for the Edexcel iGCSE exam anthology text ‘Explorers? Or boys messing about?’

My annotations for the iGCSE exam antology text ‘from The explorer’s daughter’

My own annotations for the iGCSE exam anthology text ‘A passage to Africa’

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.

Annotated edexcel iGCSE exam anthology text: The Danger of a Single Story.

This lesson gives students some example paragraphs along with the mark scheme and an explanation of what it means. The paragraphs include ones written about ‘A Passage to Africa’ and ‘A Game of Polo with a Headless Donkey’ (likely to be used in summer 2023) as well as ‘Young and Dyslexic’ and ‘The Danger of a single story’.

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

These 2 lessons bring together resources about what has been on the Edexcel iGCSE in recent years (and implied prediction about what could come up in summer 2024) My notes on the exam texts are available through TES to buy separately - these are mentioned in one of the slides so either delete, edit or get notes… There’s a resource to cut up and sort for students to think about genre contentions and the mark scheme as well as which transactional genres have been used in recent years. The other lesson is about which anthology texts have been used in recent years.

19 powerpoints to help teach Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Most of the novel is covered in detail but the final sections do not have lessons - I’ve intended students to teach each other about those. A few of the lessons don’t include much but most are very detailed with help on context and interpretation. I’ve made quite a lot of the slides of key passages for students to focus on. I’ve mentioned The Lonely Londoners as a companion text (Edexcel A Level syllabus) but most of the lessons focus on the text itself. There are essay questions from past papers on the Edexcel syllabus as well as ones I’ve devised myself. I’ve also got a handy list of all the questions asked up to June 2023. I’ve included a list of potential themes for the two texts. Quite a few critical essays from EMC are mentioned as well as from the companion to Heart of Darkness which I firmly recommend you buy as a school resource.

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.

Lesson resources for the comparison question on the Edexcel iGCSE exam paper: Q5 /22marks. This uses ‘A Passage to Africa’, along with an ‘unseen’ text. There are detailed notes which suggest areas of comparison as well as exemplar writing and paragraph starters. There’s a summary of what is on the iGCSE exam paper at the start.