Manuel Rivas’s The Carpenter’s Pencil is a wonderful novel of the Spanish Civil War, originally written in Galician. It’s a great novel for IB being translated from an author on the prescribed author list and focusing on an obvious global issue, civil war. This is a basic workbook featuring an introduction to Rivas and his work, a section by section set of activities, and a series of critical essays which can be used as the stimulus for a LP activity or even (for HL essays) as secondary reading. Also included are instructions for the old syllabus interactive oral - I have retained this even though it is no longer necessary. It can be a useful cultural understanding exercise.

This set of worksheets on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade is designed as a complete unit of study of this fascinating but accessible modernist Brazilian writer. I’ve used these resources with great success with a series of classes, and the text is a good choice which reflects the thematic areas of ‘Readers, Writers and Texts’ and ‘Time and Place’. Carlos Drummond is a Portuguese language writer who appears on the prescribed lists of authors. The course materials (designed to be taught in 3-4 weeks) reflect a standard IB selection of 15-20 poems chosen from across the poet’s output. As well as teaching the specifics of this compelling author the course also covers essential skills for critical commentary and extension/ TOK concepts. The documents (which are presented as worksheets but can easily be adapted into powerpoints) are ready for use in class and are comprised of the following: 0 a pdf of the poems covered in the course (supplied for reference) 1 Biographical focus, including contextual exercise and prompts for an interactive oral task 2 Seven Sided Poem and Multitudinous Heart - with extension work on poetry translation 3 Childhood and Confessions of a Man - creative and analytical exercise 4 Journey Through The Family including an exercise on writing introductions for critical commentary 5 Family Portrait - a full Critical Commentary exercise 6 Sonnets - an exploration of form 7 End of unit exercises including supervised writing prompts and homework essay titles, with critical materials for ambitious students