Useful and very detailed guide for writing this essay on a key character from the play.

Great PowerPoint which guides students through a range of heroes and villains, then sets up a task where they have to write a short description of a character of their own. Included is a sample piece of creative writing; a description of a dastardly Gothic villain. Full of exciting images and ideal for younger kids. I've taught this to year 7-9, GCSE students as a fn starter, and even as an enrichment class to local schoolchildren from feeder primaries. It always works and is guaranteed to produce fun responses!

Useful way to get the students of the AQA anthology poems to think comparatively. The page enlarges up well to A3 size. I have had some amazing student responses to this, creating all sorts of clever links. They find it a good way to revise poetic terminology and like to revisit the grid to add in new ideas, especially in the final column. Obviously, in the real exam they have to choose one they know and compare to an unseen, but this activity enables them to start thinking comparatively.

This pack focuses on all the difficult aspects of each scene, Language, character and theme. Lots of demanding questions and certainly an ideal pack for revision.

Ideal learning resource to help students consolidate their understanding of the poems. Contains differentiated questions, interesting contextual background information and a range of useful technical terminology. All fifteen anthology poems are covered in detail, making this an ideal purchase for revision sessions and for follow-up homework tasks, or for a takeaway resource pack for the students to work through as revision at home. That’s great value, as many resources charge several pounds for just one poem. It is a handy resource as the questions essentially revise key concepts with the students. The poetic terms can also form the basis of a useful revision test. The background of each poet, their contextual significance, focus work on key lines and useful ‘higher tier’ terms are all included. Each poem benefits from a series of probing study questions. Also included is a detailed glossary of poetic terminology, including less well known and more advanced terms,- ideal for helping your students gain sharper definition and precision in their poem analysis.

HUGE pack of FIVE DETAILED resources for you to choose from. Do all the scheme or just the key descriptive task with 4 supporting files. This is an ideal scheme of work and rich resource bundle for students of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ or, indeed, any other story which has a sequence set in forests or the wild outdoors. Also works great as a forest-themed stand-alone descriptive writing unit across KS3 and 4. The pack contains: What makes a good story?’ strips that students are invited to rank in order of importance out of 12. Helps them isolate the key ingredients of good writing. A PowerPoint slideshow summarising descriptve writing, with lots of useful technical terms and detailed examples to inspire them! The slideshow also explores other possible topics, using fairgrounds as examples, but this could be quickly adapted. A clear 2-sided task sheet inviting the students to imagine that, like Helena (or any other character you want!) - you too are stranded all alone in the enchanted forest. The sheet has a model opening paragraph to help get the students started. Lots of images to inspire them. A great little ‘forest story’ grid game, which you just print out in colour and laminate. This is used to do the paired creative ‘forest writing’ task and supports the PowerPoint, if you don;t have time for the students to make their own grids, as suggested in the slideshow! A handy vocabulary sheet with words and phrases for forests, darkness and light, covering adjectives, nouns, verbs, metaphors, similes, personification and symbolism. The sheet really helps them focus and broadens their expression.

This handout is ideal for students working on the horror, murder mystery or even detective genre. Students often find it hard to explain WHY and HOW an effect creates suspense; this worksheet helps them to form clear explanations and is an ideal launchpad for their own work on allocated phrases and sections from your focus text. Great for when teaching 'Jekyll and Hyde', 'Dorian Gray' or murder mysteries.

These sheets are all you need to create a challenging yet enjoyable lesson. Kids love this task as it enables them to legitimately insult one another whilst following thes elearning objectives: 1) How to write and Shakespearean phrases, use new vocabulary, use the grammatical structures and create word coinages. 2) Mastering the archaic vocabulary with their partners. 3) How to deliver short but effective lines dramatically, ad-libbing and varying according to context. I've used this with boys studying 'Henry V' (English troops insulting French ones and vice versa) with girls students studying 'Richard III' (Lady Anne and Richard trade insults) - and for students of 'The Tempest'. Students can, if they wish, adapt their language choices for a particular play. Caliban and Prosero's language is a mix of magical and eloquent for Prospero, with more nature-themed curses for Caliban, whereas the historical plays can bring in more historical, supernatural and military language.

This 16 slide presentation was originally created for a comparative essay task and is an ideal way of introducing the genre, introducing new focus texts and covering comparative skills. It goes through the key terms, starting with ‘Utopias’ and defining what they are, with examples and quotations, then moving onto their flipside, the dystopian vision. I used it with my A level students who were studying ‘1984’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ for coursework, but it would easily transfer across to the other texts such as ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Frankenstein’. This resource explores the same over-arching ideas behind the exam topic and explains a lot of the tricky contextual references and theories.

This is so useful. I teach with it several times a week and the students love its simplicity. 40 highly relevant, clearly defined and fully exemplified poetic terms. The technical terminology to enable your students to spot less obvious features in the exam anthologies, or, for younger students, their focus poems. ideal for extending your most able students whilst reassuring the majority with a go-to guide they can glue in and refer back to. Please see my other AQA and CIE IGCSE poetry bundles and resources.

Designed to give students a good overview of the historical Richard as well as Shakespeare's own exaggerated and distorted play version. The slides go through the key political details, explain who Richard was, then show students how Shakespeare adapted him for the stage. Clear and lots of targeted questions.

Overview of the theory with relevant examples from the story.

Fun and educational handout on accents and dialects plus a glossary of Scouser words and terms followed by an activity asking students to write phrases for Mickey in Scouser and Edward Lyons in Standard English. I created it to reinforce students’ learning of the play ‘Blood Brothers’, but you could use it just as well as a stand alone resource on accents and dialects. For many kids in southern England, this resource was an eye-opener as language is far more standardised down here. Ideal springboard for further research and creative writing in the authentic ‘voice’ for Mickey Johnston. Kids enjoy the exercise a lot and it’s a good springboard for more work on language and class.

Eh dis is dead good! Ideal resource for supplementing student understanding of 'Blood Brothers' or for any lesson on regional dialect language and accents. Gerrin!

Useful slideshow revising the key areas of punctuation. Funny examples and useful tips!

This activity can be done in class or set as homework. It was inspired by 'Skellig' and a good opening idea is to show the students David Almind's opening description of the garage. However, it works fine as an independent task. Students have to imagine they are Michael, the lonely and isolated boy described walking through the family's old garage at the start of the novel. The task develops language range ad descriptive skills. Suitable for junior ages and also as extension work for those taking entrance or end of year exams. Could also work well for AQA GCSE students ending to perfect their descriptive skills.

This works very well as a means of introducing creative writing. You print out as many copies as you need, trim, and ideally laminate. It can be used in conjunction with my 'descriptive and narrative writing' mega pack available in my shop, or as a stand alone. Give the students all 12 slips in a plastic envelope. Tell them to look at each and rank the 'ingredients' on each slip is order of most importance. It's great fun to do as the students start to realise that structure, clear plot and focus are vital. Also good to see them rearrange and reorder their rank order. Lots of follow ups for this - create their top ten 'things to avoid when writing a story', write a story which covers the 12 top elements to include...have fun!

Ideally, you enlarge this up to A3. Basically a pre made storyboard grid for the students to fill with their chosen images, text, camera angles and lighting ideas. There's room to add in text from the song in the grid along the bottom.

This is a range of resources on the news, news values and the way that media issues such as gender or violence affect the news. Some fun sample texts. You might also want to update with more recent news examples to go with the tasks.