All students will be able to engage with a winter themed poetry lesson on a cold winter’s day. Students will start by creating a table in their exercise books with extended noun phrases (two columns for adjectives and one column for nouns). Set a timer and display one image at a time so that students can add as many words as possible to their tables. Remind students that snow can be just as fragile and beautiful as it can be dangerous. For the creative writing task, challenge students to cut a snowflake from paper and write a poem along the lines or create a concrete poem in the shape of something winter related! This lesson supports learning for creative writing skills and poetry. Consider form, language and structure.

An Ofsted Outstanding proven lesson - the complete lesson plan and resources are included here. You will get: Starter - familiarise with engaging extract from the Woman in Black. Warm up - answer questions to identify strategies and unpack definitions for collaborative learning. Evaluation activity - Students work in interdependent pairs to rank the strategies (formative assessment). Evaluation writing - Students will synthesise ideas and independently write to argue and justify evaluations. Plenary - Pupils will peer assess work based on the mini mark scheme. Plus an engaging Diamond 9 activity, a guided reading handout for annotation and completed lesson plan ready to adapt. Can easily be extended over two hours of lessons. (cue evil cackle)

AQA English Language GCSE Paper 1 resources: You will get: Simplified student friendly Mark Scheme for the Writing component. Simplified student friendly Mark Scheme for the Reading component. A Paper 1 Mock Exam proforma - teachers this is your easy-to-adapt document ready to apply to your favourite text excerpts. Just plug in the key words - the rest is all there in perfect exam style questioning. English Language Paper 1 and Paper 2 breakdown. This is an easily accessible cloze exercise - students can adapt this to personalise their targets. …and… A mini study sheet for revision as the exams approach for Paper 1 and 2! Print these out or share electronically for students to make the most of their revision. Good luck with your exams and may the odds be ever in your favour!

This is an interesting and exciting mock exam to provide to students exploring Oscar Wilde’s poignant work Dorian Gray. This resource includes questions 1-4 exploring language. After the exam, choose the best ones from the class to share and always encourage peer assessment. You could also invite your class to complete in pairs or groups for interdependent learning!

Calling all key stage 3 students everywhere! Step back in time to experience the sights and sounds (and smells…) of Shakespeare’s London! Students will read an extract about Master Burbage (one of Shakespeare’s star performers) and his apprentice walking the stinking, smelling streets of Elizabethan/Jacobean London on their way to the theatre. The lesson is a guided reading with summarising and inferring prompts with a creative writing challenge at the end. An excellent introduction to any Shakespeare scheme of work.

This game I saw on Pinterest and have adapted for my classroom. This game is awesome. I have played it with every year group from 7-13 and every ability and personality from students with special educational needs to the most gifted and talented, from students that are quiet and sullen to the most confident leader. Every theme and every topic can be used in this excellent revision game. For this game to be a success, you will need to be open to a little noise in your class. It gets lively and every student will want to be involved and have a part to play. The game can last as long or short as you like but I find it is optimal for 45-60 minutes. You will need: A soft(ish) ball to throw into a clean(ish) bin. A marked free-throw line A marked out 3 point line A marked out 2 point line A large dry-erase board and marker or SMART Board for scoring.

Happy Halloween! This is the perfect Halloween themed walking talking mock exam with bonus feedback including REAL student examples. ‘The Halloween Tree’ extract by Ray Bradbury is the perfect literary excerpt rich with grotesque imagery and vivid descriptions to bring the literature to life. Walk through the extract (provided) and complete the mock exam question (in the PPT). Following the mock exam, have students reflect on their own work, mark in pairs or work can be formally assessed. The second PPT includes real student examples with explanations of what the questions are looking for. Happy Halloween! Mwahaha!

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has honoured Queen Elizabeth II with an acrostic poem entitled ‘Floral Tribute’. This PPT and handout (in doc and PDF) are a whole hour’s lesson plan ready to reach. Starter: Discuss and distill: what do you know about Queen Elizabeth? Task: Pass out the handout to the students. There are 10 versions of the poem, each missing 10 different words. Students will need to work as a team to complete the poems as quickly as they can. Teachers print off or share this document with the class electronically to annotate. Task: Close language analysis. Line by line annotations for students to engage and mark up the poem for the next task. Discuss the extended metaphors and the hidden meaning of the monarch’s extraordinary life. Task: Choose one of four possible responses to the poem. Task includes three close language analysis options and one creative response option. Plenary: Share response or pair mark for feedback.

BOO! Didn’t mean to scare you - just wanted to get your attention. One of my favourite topics to teach is horror writing because all students can have so much fun getting creative. In this lesson, students will use language skills to design a monster, label its features and explain its behaviour and movements using detail. Examples are included for more support and inspiration. This lesson is suitable for all key stage 3, especially year 7 and 8 and makes a fantastic Halloween filler activity too or homework assignment.

Students reading Macbeth will benefit from this modern look at interpretations of the witches. What do they mean? How do they appear? What would this mean for Shakespeare’s Jacobean audience? Supported with sentence starters for weaker learners.

Challenge your students to write a short spooky story. This lesson has a range of short starter activities to help students practise speech marks, dashes and consider what makes something suspenseful. The lesson builds up to listening to a two-minute film clip to garner ideas for creative writing. The main activity is to write a mini-saga, a 50 word story based on the lesson’s creative ideas. Why not take the lesson further and in groups, students should vote for their favourite mini sagas? The class favourites can be read aloud - after peer assessment and editing, of course. This lesson supports literacy and language skills.

Students will gain an overview of attitudes from WW1 poets and be engaged with this guided reading activity. Students will glean inferences from a range of poems whilst choosing poignant words and phrases from each of the poems. At the end of the lesson, students will have a range of ideas to construct a found poem - rearranging the words and phrases to form a new poem of their own. Guided with examples and images. This resource has been very successful across year 9, 10 and 11 when students learn about conflict poetry and WW1.

Liven up your mock exam questions with this example mock exam paper based on AQA’s English Language Paper 1 exams. This paper’s theme is Aqaba, Jordan. It explores language, structure and the landscape for students to analyse the language in the accessible article. Question 5 offers a creative writing question using a prompt and a picture to best mirror live examination styles.

This is a mock exam written to focus on aspects of Elizabethan England (ties in with Shakespeare studies too for Literature!). The fiction text follows Master Burbage’s new servant boy through a very visceral and sensory-rich Elizabethan England across Tower Bridge in London. It is a bit gross and lot interesting! Students will be engaged with this writing and have a fantastic opportunity to unpick the flesh from the skulls in this mock exam paper.

This is a comprehensive walking talking mock exam exploring in depth responses to questions 3 and 4 on the AQA style examination for English Language Paper 1. The theme is using an extract from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band. There are prompts to guide students, notes to help students develop strategies and exemplar answers from bands 4 to 7 to unpack. Resources include individual PPTs for question 3 and 4 guides, a PPT for the exam per question with prompts, the mock exam with extract and a printable question 3 band 6 response for students to highlight and annotate.

Want to bring Macbeth to life in your classroom? Once you have read up to Act 2 when King Duncan is slain, give your students a lesson they will never forget. This lesson earned outstanding marks at a recent observation. First, students need to be familiar with the characters and plot up to the murder of King Duncan and up to the end of Act 2. Students will choose a character to ‘become’ and plan some thoughtful, creative writing to understand the character’s thoughts and feelings. Students will be selected to take on different roles during the murder trial. More able students may wish to become the judge and enjoy dishing out punishments as they see fit while others will be accused and called to the witness stand to defend allegations of murder and treason. The teacher should stand in as the KC interrogator but if you have a more able class, you may wish to give students the chance to interrogate once you have set the tone. Included are two lessons, exemplar reflection sheets covering bands 4, 5 and 6 and character cards plus an adaptable script sheet to follow for the courtroom drama. PS I taught this lesson in an observation and received an Outstanding. I hope you love it too!

Liven up Owen’s brilliant and grotesque imagery of WW1’s tragedies when reading Dulce et Decorum Est. Included in this pack is Dulce Bingo - the teacher sheet calls out words and phrases from the poem and students use their bingo sheets to match the technique. Students can also write in the corresponding word/phrase to prove they know it is correct. Included in this pack is Dulce lucky dip Point/Evidence/Explain paragraph cloze exercises. Cut out the boxes and students can choose randomly which paragraphs they have to work to fill in. This will challenge students to think with more breadth and specificity when showing their understanding of the poetry. Included are also sample PEE paragraphs up to Band 8 supporting the GCSE English Language Paper 1 and Paper 2 skills.

Students will use a visual puzzle to unpick ideas about Bishop Hatto, the antagonist before diving into the genre of ballads. Students should read the first half, form ideas independently or in groups and pairs before reading the second half. Students are sure to be in for a surprise at the end! Students will be able to compare their original ideas and extend their inferences and summaries in a guided peer assessment. The lesson can be broken down with further supported tasks and the poem can be jumbled up for additional challenge. This lesson builds skills in key stage 3 for the English Language Paper 2 Question 2 GCSE under AQA and any summarising and inferring skills in other GCSEs or assessments. PS Everytime I teach this lesson I always get students responding with feedback that it’s funny or gross. Everyone gets engaged with this! Enjoy!

A fun and varied almost 100% self-explanatory book for kids to engage and improve upon literacy skills. Includes 32 activities that can be done in the classroom or at home. This book is all about engagement to get kids thinking, talking and writing. Written for year 2, this can be easily adapted for year 1 or year 3, depending on children’s abilities. They will LOVE IT! Activities include: Infer about Frederick Douglass’ escape from slavery and how he learned to read! Draw Dracula based on an accessible version of Bram’s masterpiece! Imagine what happens when your shadow tries to escape! Write a book review for your favourite book! Write a funny story and read it aloud! Pick out verbs and adverbs whilst learning about how cool your muscles and skeleton is! Draw in punctuation whilst learning about how the Ancient Romans all shared a toilet. Yuck! Write a story based on really interesting and weird pictures! Learn about Gertrude Ederle who was the first woman to swim across the English Channel and figure out what she did to face her enemies! And much, much more!

AQA GCSE Mock Exam for Paper 1 on English Language with example responses of band 6+ responses using Banksy as an example with a simple article. This PPT and accompanying exam walk the students through strategies and tips for answering the questions to pick up maximum points.