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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 just a cut and paste list of all the Keats exam questions asked since June 2017.

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.

This lesson stimulates students to consider what exam questions might be asked (you might need to have all the exam questions asked so far ready for them) and reminds them of how to plan and write an essay to fit the mark scheme for the Edexcel A Level. I’ve written some exemplar paragraphs for them to critique too.

This lesson encourages students to revise their knowledge of the Keats poems on the Edexcel A Level syllabus. There’s a poster-making activity as well as a ‘guess the exam question’ activity (as of May 2023)

This powerpoint and the hand-out which duplicates it give students detailed notes about which contextual ideas they should use for each of the poems in exam essays. The powerpoint is designed as a traditional lecture from which students can take notes. Later the teacher can give out the word version so they have full details. I’ve suggested that students take notes from the powerpoint in a way which makes them focus on something specific like - what they didn’t know before or key details, rather than attempting to take detailed notes.

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.

A simple list of creative writing tasks for students to try.

Hand-written annotations on the Edexcel iGCSE coursework anthology extract ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you’ from ‘the Woman in Black’.

Hand-written annotations for the poems on the Edexcel iGCSE coursework poetry anthology: Out out Disabled The Bright Lights of Sarajevo Still I rise an Unknown Girl

This lesson is reflective and suggests ways of editing the creative work done over the course of the Macbeth scheme of work