This lesson gives an over-view of Romanticism and contains a time-line of the Romantic writers and what else was going on at the time.

This might be for students or teachers. It explains commonly used poetic forms and how form might relate to meaning in the poem. It is useful for higher level GCSE students or A Level students and includes examples from lots of well-known poems used on various syllabuses.

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.

Lesson which suggests thinking about different kinds of analysis and critical standpoints with a cake analogy.

It’s a bit pricey because I put lots of information into it and there are loads of examples of plastic theatre and links to the music in the play. It’s really good! Each scene has notes on stage directions and how Williams has used set, costume, lighting and sound as part of his plastic theatre concept.

My mnemonic for the most commonly used poetic techniques is Shampoo Traces and here is a table of the devices as well as some definitions, examples and potential effects. You can follow it up with the powerpoint (answers are in the notes on each slide) and the answer sheet.

Resource of contextual information with prompts to link to the play and a lesson with a focus on epigrams in The Importance of Being Earnest

An intense lesson on form in poetry - you need to fill in some of the blanks with the Word doc notes in some cases. Goes with ‘L5 revision of form in poetry’

This lesson suggests how to write analytical comparison of the poems Journal of a Disappointed Man and Please Hold from the Edexcel anthology poems of the decade. Lots of examples of analysis.

This lesson focuses on how to write the Q4 analytical task on one of the Edexcel iGCSE exam anthology texts. It suggests strategies and uses ‘Young and Dyslexic? You’ve got it going on’ as the example text.

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’

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 lesson presumes that your students can work out the meaning of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ themselves but suggests themes and context to link to and gives an essay question.

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.

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.

This lesson uses ‘nonsense’ poetry as a way to think about how language is used in ‘Look we have coming to Dover!’ in the poems of the decade collection for Edexcel.