This lesson teaches the basics of rhythm and encourages students to write poetry using rhyme and rhythm.

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.

The balcony scene with place to annotate elements of courtly love.

Summarise the whole of Macbeth in one lesson with a Whoosh. Fun classroom drama activity useful for doing at the beginning of a unit on the play.

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

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’.

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

This lesson uses the Keats poem and ideas about art to help students consider the poem ‘Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn’ from the collection poems of the decade for Edexcel.

Ths lesson deals with the second part of the poem Out of the Bag by Seamus Heaney. It’s got a key for all the classical allusions, which is worth the price alone!

A revision lesson for students to remind them about how to write about plastic theatre in A Streetcar Named Desire

This lesson examines Material from the Edexcel collection poems of the decade and suggests a comparison with Genetics to get students thinking about comparison

This lesson sets out the whole A Edexcel A Level as well as teaching some useful mnemonics for analysing poetry. The poem ‘Genetics’ from Poems of the Decade is introduced for discussion.

Questions on a diary response as well as a letter by a contemporary audience member of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars production of The Tempest. This can be used as a timed assessment or a piece of work during the course.

This goes with lesson 6 in my scheme of work and asks students to find quotations to match statements.

This lesson examines scene 8 in which Stanley controls the women

A focus on scene 7 of A Streetcar Named Desire and Blanche’s obsession with bathing

This lesson examines scene 6 and the growing relationship between Blanche and Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire

Lesson 2 of my scheme of work for The Tempest. Get students to think about Ariel and Caliban as people rather than non-human. Introducing post-colonialism.