This single lesson focuses on using pathetic fallacy in writing to create a particular mood. The starter activity looks at using semi colons accurately in sentences, before moving on to exploring the impact of pathetic fallacy. The lesson includes a model descriptive paragraph, followed by two opportunities for descriptive work looking at a beach scene, once on a sunny day, and once where the weather is poor. I’ve used this as part of a wider unit on descriptive writing, but also as part of my teaching on The Woman in Black at KS3, as this novel includes a good level of description to use as inspiration. I’m sure it could be woven into a unit of work on many different novels.

An introductory lesson on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, looking at context and asking pupils to consider the lives of migrant workers. The lesson introduces the key terms: American Dream; migrant workers; Great Depression; Dust Bowl; mass migration. Each term is explained as part of the story that led to the historical setting of the novel, with imagery for pupils to reflect on and consider what life must have been like for the people involved: you can make this as interactive as you like, and there’s mileage in printing the photos and asking pupils to look at them to consider what they can learn about the Great Depression from them. Pupils are asked to consider what the dreams and hopes of a migrant worker would be, and there is a structured activity asking pupils to write a diary entry from their perspective, with scaffolded suggestions of paragraph topics. The lesson ends with a quick look at Robbie Burns’ ‘To a Mouse’, to understand the source of the novel’s title. I’ve designed this lesson for a lower-ability GCSE class, but it could definitely work at KS3 too, or be tweaked up to suit higher-attaining pupils.

Two lecture-style lessons for A Level on the context of Brave New World, with the first looking at life at the time, and the second moving onto life since. Across these two lessons, designed for when pupils have already read the book, a range of ideas about historical context are considered. The first looks at what was going on at the time when Huxley was writing, considering mass production, eugenics, and conditioning, whereas the second moves into considering how we have started to move towards that world in the 90 years since Huxley wrote the novel: changes in technology and what it means to be human. Knowledge of context (both when the text was written and has been received) is imperative at A Level and I’ve found both of these lessons have really helped my pupils to get a good grounding in what they need to know.

A series of three lessons which work well as an opening on A Christmas Carol, exploring what life was like in Victorian Britain, and Dicken’s writing style. The first two lessons here focus on Victorian lifestyles, with one lesson offering pupils the chance to carry out their own research (guidance is given in the form of suggested websites for each topic, looking at Victorian childhood, fashions and etiquette, Charles Dickens, and the Industrial Revolution); the second lesson takes more of a lecture style, with images on the slides matching the images on the pupil sheet to help practise concise note-taking. The third lesson in this pack uses extracts from other Dickens novels to start to explore what his views of poor people and society were. While these texts are quite challenging, the comprehension questions on the bottom help pupils to develop their understanding, and groups can be arranged to support those who will find this more challenging. Personally I teach A Christmas Carol at KS3, but these would make a good introduction to the GCSE course too.

Three separate cloze activities to revise the context of Macbeth, focusing on: witches and supernatural; James I and the divine right of kings; the real Macbeth and Banquo in the 11th Century. I’ve included a word box to fill in the gaps. It would be really easy to remove this to increase the level of challenge. Each sheet also features some questions on the end about the topic, to help pupils connect these contextual ideas to what’s happening in the play: I’ve found that at GCSE this linking context to the text can be a challenge!