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.

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.

This scheme of work gets students to work towards writing an analytical essay, with a paragraph every couple of lessons building into an essay which includes context and critical comment from other writers. It also has a creative task writing in a teenager-idiom and a poster-making activity based on Holden’s perambulations around New York. There are 8 lessons, each starting with about 10 minutes of reading as a class and then about an hour of activities. Lesson areas are: schools, teenagers, characterisation, travel poster, symbolism, Bildungsroman, catcher of children, critics and finishing the essay.

There’s lots to choose from here. Nominally 8 lessons but elastic depending on your group and how long you want to spend on individual sonnets or activities. Starting with a look at love lyrics in modern songs and moving to sonnets, with information about context, where sonnets came from, structure and meaning. There are activities on analysing and comparing poems and the focus is analytical, with an end of unit essay.

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.