This 16-page resource booklet contains a wide range of challenging and engaging comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of Kit Wright’s poem 'The Magic Box.’ Teachers have found the activities particularly useful throughout teaching, or for revision or guided reading sessions. Students have found these resources extremely engaging, and it is clearly highlighted within each task regarding which assessment strands the task is designed to demonstrate. It is provided in both Word (to allow for easy editing) and PDF (to ensure for consistency of formatting between computers). Activities within the booklet include (amongst many others): ‘Analysing Context’ - helping students to ‘Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written.’ ‘Analysing Subject Matter, Language and Structure’ - to help students to ‘Analyse the language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.’ ‘Diary Entry’ - to help students to ‘Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation. Make an informed personal response, recognising that other responses to a text are possible and evaluating these.’ ‘The Speaker’ - to help students to ‘Read, understand and respond to texts. Students should be able to: maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations.’

This interesting and engaging lesson enables students to build their understanding of Inspector Goole, one of the chief protagonists in ‘An Inspector Calls.’ In particular, students understand the Inspector’s main characteristics and quotations. They also contemplate whether they feel the Inspector presents the voice and key messages of Priestley himself. The lesson follows a clear, logical, bite-size learning journey, which guides students towards differentiated learning objectives. Over the course of this journey, they become able to: - Recall and understand the key features of The Inspector's character profile; - Link The Inspector to Priestley's key messages and the context of the play; - Piece together the Eva Smith case from the viewpoint of The Inspector; - Read and understand the final section of the play; - Analyse the character further in response to key quotations; - Argue the extent to which the Inspector presents the views of Priestley himself; - Peer/self-assess learning attempts. This resource pack includes: - A visually engaging whole-lesson PowerPoint presentation; - A clear and interesting worksheet on interpreting The Inspector's character; - Extract from Act 3 of the play for students to read and interpret; - Inspector's notepad to piece together the Eva Smith case; - A scaffolded template for students to complete the main analysis task; - A detailed lesson plan, complete with what the teacher and students should aim to achieve at each stage of the lesson. All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on the final slide of the PowerPoint.

This whole class reading session aims to develop children’s comprehension skills through a reading of the opening chapter of Katherine Rundell’s ‘The Good Thieves.’ The resource pack includes the extract and all of the activities for the session, which the class are guided through via a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation. The reading is followed by a series of activities aiming to develop children’s retrieval, explanation, inference, prediction and summarising skills. It also contains a vocabulary check immediately after the extract is read to clarify any unfamiliar/ difficult language. The tasks are comprised of quick-check questions, solo thinking, pair/ group discussions and deeper thinking activities. The session is best suited for children in upper KS2. I originally used this with Year 5-6 children, although with minor adaptations it could feasibly be used with slightly younger and older year groups. The session is also suitable for home/ remote learning.

This interesting and highly-stimulating lesson enables students to make clear and sustained inferences and interpretations about the context and themes in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. In particular, students engage analytically with Alfieri’s opening monologue, demonstrating an understanding of what it reveals about Italian American culture and community at the time. The lesson follows a clear, logical, bite-size learning journey, which guides students towards differentiated learning objectives. Over the course of this journey, they become able to: - Understand the relevance of Brooklyn Bridge, both literally and figuratively; - Understand the relevance of Arthur Miller’s life and influences; - Read and understand Alfieri’s opening monologue, in which the geographical, social, and historical context is set, and infer and interpret the key information provided; - Understand the key term ‘Omerta’, and apply codes of honour to their own contexts; - Analyse Alfieri’s opening monologue in terms of the key information it provides the audience with about context and community; -Peer assess each other’s learning attempts. This resource pack includes: - A visually engaging whole-lesson PowerPoint presentation;; - Paper copies and online links to the extract needed for the lesson (Alfieri’s opening monologue); - Cards for application activity; - Interpretations and inferences worksheet (including answer sheet for teachers); - A logically scaffolded essay template; - A detailed lesson plan, complete with what the teacher and students should aim to achieve at each stage of the lesson. All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on the final slide of the PowerPoint.

This whole class reading session aims to develop children’s comprehension skills through a reading of the opening chapter of Louie Stowell’s ‘Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good.’ The resource pack includes the extract and all of the activities for the session, which the class are guided through via a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation. The reading is followed by a series of activities aiming to develop children’s retrieval, explanation, inference, prediction and summarising skills. It also contains a vocabulary check immediately after the extract is read to clarify any unfamiliar/ difficult language. The tasks are comprised of quick-check questions, solo thinking, pair/ group discussions and deeper thinking activities. The session is best suited for children in KS2. The session is also suitable for home/ remote learning. The extract is provided as a PDF, and a link to the online version is also included on the first slide.

This detailed and visually-appealing resource offers a complete reference point for students learning or revising Michelle Magorian’s 'Goodnight Mister Tom.’ It contains comprehensive sections on: Context; Section by Section Summary (with quotes); Main Characters; Themes; Literary Devices; The Author’s Perspective. All key words and ideas are compartmentalised for easy reference. The resource is designed to be printed onto A3 or A4, and is provided as both a PDF and a Word version (so that you can edit if you want to). All images used are licensed for commercial use.

This resource booklet contains a wide range of age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of John Green’s ‘The Fault in Our Stars.’ Teachers have found them particularly useful in comprehension or guided reading sessions. They are perfect for aiding the progress of children towards meeting the KS3 expectations within the National Curriculum framework. Children have found these resources extremely engaging, and for teachers there is explicit information within each task regarding which comprehension strands the task is designed to demonstrate. They also relate to key extracts, characters, and themes from the story, ensuring that children gain a deep understanding of the text. Activities within the booklet include: ‘Green’s Description’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Know how language, including figurative language, vocabulary choice, grammar, text structure and organisational features, present meaning.’ ‘Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters Character Profiles’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Study setting, plot, and characterisation, and the effects of these.’ ‘Context: Green’s Life, Illness and Mortality’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Know the purpose, audience and context of the writing and drawing on this knowledge to support comprehension.’ ‘Vocabulary Inspector’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Learn new vocabulary, relating it explicitly to known vocabulary and understanding it with the help of context and dictionaries.’ Plus many, many more activities (the booklet is 23 pages in length!) I’ve also added it as a PDF in case the formatting differs on your computer. All images are licensed for commercial use.

This detailed and visually-appealing resource offers a complete reference point for students learning or revising Mark Haddon’s 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.’ It contains comprehensive sections on: Context; Section by Section Summary (with quotes); Main Characters; Themes; Literary Devices; The Author’s Perspective. All key words and ideas are compartmentalised for easy reference. The resource is designed to be printed onto A3 or A4, and is provided as both a PDF and a Word version (so that you can edit if you want to). All images used are licensed for commercial use.

This resource booklet contains a wide range of age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of Roald Dahl’s ‘Matilda.’ (Teachers have found them particularly useful in comprehension or guided reading sessions). They are perfect for aiding the progress of children towards meeting the KS1 expectations within the new National Curriculum framework. Children love learning from these resources, whilst they are also of great use to teachers, as there is explicit information within each task regarding which comprehension strands the task is designed to demonstrate. They also relate to key extracts, characters, and themes from the story, ensuring that children gain a deep understanding of the text. Activities within the booklet include: ‘Feed Bogtrotter!’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘talk about their favourite words and phrases in the story;’ ‘Dahl’s Description’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Explain meanings of words that they know and ask the meaning of new words. Link the meaning of new words to words that they already know;’ ‘The Opening Pages’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Say what might happen next in a story based on what has happened so far;’ ‘Story Mountain’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Enjoy reading and discussing the order of events in books and how items of information are related.’ Plus many, many more activities (the booklet is around 20 pages in length!) I’ve also added it as a PDF in case the formatting differs on your computer. All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on a separate document (included).

This resource booklet contains a wide range of age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ Teachers have found them particularly useful in exam revision, comprehension tasks, or guided reading sessions. They are perfect for aiding the progress of students towards meeting the KS4 expectations within the new National Curriculum framework - this makes the tasks suitable for all examining bodies. Students have found these resources extremely engaging, and for teachers there is explicit information within each task regarding which comprehension strands the task is designed to demonstrate. They also relate to key extracts, characters, and themes from the play ensuring that students gain a deep understanding of the text. Activities within the booklet include: ‘Context: Shakespearean Times’ - to aid students with ‘Drawing on knowledge of the purpose, audience and context of the writing, including its social, historical and cultural context and the literary tradition to which it belongs, to inform evaluation;’ ‘Shakespeare’s Description’ - to aid students with ‘Analysing a writer’s choice of vocabulary, form, grammatical and structural features, and evaluating their effectiveness and impact;’ ‘Prospero’ and ‘Miranda’ character profiles- to aid students with ‘Seeking evidence in the text to support a point of view, including justifying inferences with evidence;’ ‘Editing the Play’ - to aid students with ‘Making an informed personal response, recognising that other responses to a text are possible and evaluating these.’ Plus many, many more activities (the booklet is around 30 pages in length!) I’ve also added it as a PDF in case the formatting differs on your computer. All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on a separate document (included).

This resource booklet contains a wide range of age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’ Teachers have found them particularly useful in exam revision, comprehension tasks, or guided reading sessions. They are perfect for aiding the progress of students towards meeting the KS4 expectations within the new National Curriculum framework - this makes the tasks suitable for all examining bodies. Students have found these resources extremely engaging, and for teachers there is explicit information within each task regarding which comprehension strands the task is designed to demonstrate. They also relate to key extracts, characters, and themes from the story, ensuring that students gain a deep understanding of the text. Activities within the booklet include: - ‘Context: The Russian Revolution’ - to aid students with ‘Drawing on knowledge of the purpose, audience and context of the writing, including its social, historical and cultural context and the literary tradition to which it belongs, to inform evaluation;’ - ‘Orwell’s Description’ - to aid students with ‘Analysing a writer’s choice of vocabulary, form, grammatical and structural features, and evaluating their effectiveness and impact;’ - ‘Napoleon’ - to aid students with ‘Seeking evidence in the text to support a point of view, including justifying inferences with evidence;’ - ‘Editing the Text’ - to aid students with ‘Making an informed personal response, recognising that other responses to a text are possible and evaluating these.’ Plus many, many more activities (the booklet is around 30 pages in length!) I’ve also added it as a PDF in case the formatting differs on your computer. All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on a separate document (included).

This resource booklet contains a wide range of age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of Emma Carroll’s 'Secrets of a Sun King.’ Teachers have found them particularly useful in comprehension or guided reading sessions. They are perfect for aiding the progress of children towards meeting the KS2 expectations within the National Curriculum framework. Children love learning from these resources, whilst they are also of great use to teachers, as there is explicit information within each task regarding which comprehension strands the task is designed to demonstrate. They also relate to key extracts, characters, and themes from the story, ensuring that children gain a deep understanding of the text. Activities within the booklet include: ‘Carroll’s Language Techniques’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Explain meanings of words that they know and ask the meaning of new words. Link the meaning of new words to words that they already know;’ ‘Character Analysis of Lil and Tulip Mendoza’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Understand what is read by drawing on information from more than one paragraph, identifying key details that support the main ideas, and using quotations for illustration;’ ‘An Interview with Howard Carter’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Understand what is read by drawing on information from more than one paragraph, identifying key details that support the main ideas, and using quotations for illustration;’ ‘Storyboarders’ - to enable students to demonstrate that they can: ‘Read books that are structured in different ways and for a range of purposes.’ Plus many, many more activities (the booklet is over 20 pages in length!) I’ve also added it as a PDF in case the formatting differs on your computer. The resource is suitable for home/ remote learning.

This detailed and visually-appealing resource offers a complete reference point for students learning or revising John Cooper Clarke’s poem 'I Wanna Be Yours.’ It contains comprehensive sections on: Context; Line-by-Line Analysis; Poetic Devices/ Language Devices; Themes; Form/Structure; Poems for Comparison; Links to Wider Reading. Key words and ideas are underlined for easy reference. The resource is designed to be printed onto A3, and is provided as both a PDF and a Word version (so that you can edit if you want to).

This highly engaging and informative double lesson (around 1.5 to 2 hours of teaching materials) helps build students’ ability at using varied and imaginative techniques to describe emotions in their creative writing. Specifically, students learn how to create in-depth paragraphs detailing the emotional state of their narrator and characters, both implicitly and explicitly. I wrote this lesson because I noticed that there are an extremely high volume of students that approach creative writing tasks (even in their GCSEs) offering little depth or detail in terms of their characters emotions. Even though they have clearly learnt a number of writing techniques from their teachers, their emotional writing often merely explicitly states how a character feels, using the same four or five emotions. In this lesson, students learn: - To define what emotions are; - To understand and use the vast range of emotional vocabulary and synonyms available in the English language; - To investigate different emotions, including how they can manifest themselves; - To understand how emotions can be communicated utilising a range of descriptive devices; - To create an imaginative and emotionally-driven piece of creative writing; - To self-assess their creative writing attempts; Included are all worksheets, and detailed and visual PowerPoint presentation, which explains each concept clearly, and a lesson plan for teacher guidance.

These handy helpsheets have been employed by teachers across the curriculum to aid students completing extended writing tasks for a particular purpose. There are helpsheets for: - Informing - Describing - Analysing - Arguing - Explaining - Evaluating - Persuading - Instructing Each helpsheet defines the aim of the writing purpose, details the key writing features to be used, offers sentence starters, and gives a short example of the writing purpose, alongside other hints and tips. These helpsheets have also been blown up to A3 or A2 size to become engaging and interactive literacy across the curriculum posters.

This engaging and informative lesson enables students to understand the key features of effective villains, as characterised by Lord Voldemort in J.K Rowling’s 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.' In particular, students highlight key character traits of Voldemort evident in Chapter 17 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (e.g. lack of empathy, hideous appearance, links to the hero, and a clear goal/objective), before utilising this understanding to create and describe their own effective villains. The lesson follows a step-by-step learning journey, in which children learn through: - Comprehending Voldemort's role in the novel leading up to the Chapter 17; - Collectively defining the features of effective villains; - Reading Chapter 17 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, identifying and explaining his characterisation as a villain; - Analysing the effectiveness of each of Rowling's techniques in creating the image of an effective villain; - Creating and describing their own imaginative villains, utilising the features of villains effectively and imaginatively throughout; - Peer assessing each other's learning attempts. Included is: - Whole lesson PowerPoint - colourful and comprehensive; - Paper extract of Chapter 17 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (freely available online); - Lord Voldemort analysis template; - Create Your Own Villain template; -Comprehensive lesson plan. All resources are provided in Word (for easy editing) and PDF (to ensure formatting remains fixed between different computers). There are also opportunities for group learning, speaking and listening, peer assessment, and whole class discussion. I originally used these resources with year 7/8 classes, however colleagues have used them for between years 3 and 10 with some adaptations. All images are licensed for commercial use, and image rights are listed on the last page of the presentation.

This lesson enables students to plan and create their own interesting, detailed, and imaginative feature articles. Through analysing existing feature articles, and noting their features of subject matter, language, and structure, students create articles that are highly appropriate to the genre and audiences of different magazines. Over the course of their learning journey, students: - Define and exemplify what feature articles are; - Identify and understand the different language and subject matter elements are within feature articles; - Analyse the language techniques and structures used within a model example of a feature article; - Write their own imaginative and appropriate front covers; - Peer and self assess each other's front cover attempts. The resources include: -Visually engaging whole-lesson PowerPoint; -A colourful and clear helpsheet for writing to explain; -Template for planning feature articles; -Andy Murray feature article for analysis; -Helpful and comprehensive step-by-step lesson plan. All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on the final page of the slide. NOTE - Internet access is preferable for the planning task.