Some ideas for essay planning for Measure for MEasure

This lesson finishes off the play and suggests some analytical title formats for students to plan

This very long lesson / 2 lessons includes lots of examples of the kinds of literature which existed before novels. It aims to show students quite how dull most literature was and why the conditions arose for the birth and growth of the novel as a genre. It’s pretty context heavy and perhaps a bit dry unless you get students to come and read out some of the pre-novel literature reproduced on the slides - pompous and long winded speeches, religious tracts, sermons to young women on how they should behave, religious poetry, translations of the Classics etc etc. By contrast, novels seem modern, insightful and emotionally mature. I’ve put suggestions in the ‘notes’ section of each slide.

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

This introduces the idea of what rhyme and half rhyme are used for in poetry. It can be used for higher level GCSE or A Level students.

These notes give an overview of how rhythm is used in poetry and how you can link it to meaning.

This lesson has an overview of how the Edexcel A Level’s requirements work for Keats as well as looking at Keats’ early life and the first 2 sonnets on the Edexcel list: O Solitude and On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. I’ve also written a summary of what to expect from a sonnet and put all the Keats sonnets in a Word Doc.

This lesson looks at the first half of The Eve of St Agnes as well as suggesting it’s all about states of consciousness. There’s a selection of critical comments on the poem which can help inform students’ opinions.

This lesson gives some context about Keats’ life and has slides for annotating ‘On the Sea’ and ‘In Drear nighted December’. There’s a resource on negative capability too.

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 lessons goes through the common errors teenagers make in their writing with suggestions on how to improve their work by using punctuation

Detailed lesson on various ways of structuring creative writing with picture stimuli.

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

This contextual information prompts students to think about the differing interpretations of the law about marriage and sex for Elizabethans

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 includes context on Keats’ life as well as slides for annotating To Sleep and Bright Star. There’s a little quiz too.

This lesson examines the second half of the Keats poem ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ with a focus on consciousness. There’s an essay question to try too.

This lesson includes more Keats context and slides for annotating ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’ and ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’. It has suggestions for research and wider reading.

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.