I created this pack for my year eight students, but I have also delivered it very successfully to year nines and tens. It is huge, with well over thirty pages and over twelve sections, such as: Introduction to Orwell, his social and political beliefs Focused chapter comprehension tasks What is an allegory? What is satire and irony? The language of political persuasion Numerous student-centred tasks, from research to speaking and listening, creative writing to political speech-writing. I deliberately designed the pack so that teachers can customise it by intended year group. Older kids will get more from the contextual background materials than younger ones. They do so well on this unit and love the political hustings orals, making a persuasive speech and getting confident with persuasive and satirical language. I prefer the older Halas and Bachelor film to teach alongside this scheme.

Contains: poetic terms knowledge checklist to use as a starter, the main lesson in PowerPoint, including questions and tasks, copy of the poem with some brief context included on the sheet and finally, a set of group work tasks. I created these for another lesson ob. It works well if you show the PowerPoint after you have assessed how many poetic terms the students know (see file for this) and before you get them to read the poem. The slides work as parts of the lesson with Q &A sections on them. Other resources offer students background info on St George and the dragon and on the painting. Overall, a high quality detailed lesson which makes for a great introduction to an enjoyable poem: everything's prepared and ready to go.

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.

It's hard to find good teaching resources on gender biases within written texts, which is why I created these. I used them in an observed lesson and there is enough material here to fill a double, or you could do one text a period. The pack contains: a full slideshow which introduces the topic, explores ideology with fun examples and cartoons, asks differentiated questions and spgets students thinking about the topic. It also has task guideline slides to steer them through their exercise. This is to work through a series of newspaper and advisory texts which may reveal gender bias. Students are encouraged to use linguistic terminology and frameworks. The slideshow also has answers at the end, which helps students improve their textual analysis and annotation skills as they get to see what they missed. The texts themselves are hilarious, especially the tabloid ones! If you teach in a single sex school, this one's a must! Bound to excite good discussions!

This is a great slideshow with lots of tasks and interesting background material to help introduce GCSE students to the contextual background of Romantic poetry. You could also deliver this at the end of year nine as a stand-alone unit. There are over 14 slides which explain what the poetic movement was, the concerns voiced by Blake, what the 'Fall' was and how Romantics wanted to redeem it and, finally, links on to a study of 'The Prelude'. The poem section is covered in the last part of the resource to enable students to analyse the section using their new-found contextual knowledge of Romanticism, This resource could be adapted to be used with older or younger students, but is ideal fr GCSE students, particularly those studying the AQA anthology, which includes the extract from Wordsworth's poem.

A very thorough set of slides which includes full contextual background on London in the 18th and 19th centuries, useful images to help students visualise the city and a detailed focus section on Wordsworth’s ‘Lines composed upon Westminster Bridge’, including a set of focus work cards. This allows the students to tackle different aspects of the poem in groups. Next, Blake’s ‘London’ is explored, leading to slides which invite the students to compare the two. Full of useful context and suitable for able and average students. Over 16 carefully designed slides here.

I created this lesson for an observed lesson and it covers both poems in depth and offer them wider contextual points to enrich their answers. Ideal preparation for the comparative skills section of the AQA poetry exam, and for revising Blake. The 'odd one out' activity differentiates by outcome and gets students thinking carefully about the city and what it might represent. Lots of extension tasks and homework opportunies. Over 16 slides and structured to take a lesson.