I teach English at an academically successful school in Berkshire. I only publish resources that I have personally used in the classroom and always aim for maximum visual and interactive impact.
I teach English at an academically successful school in Berkshire. I only publish resources that I have personally used in the classroom and always aim for maximum visual and interactive impact.
A simple, highly-visual introduction to adjectives with a range of explanations and tasks for students to complete. There is also information and tasks on adjectival phrases and postmodification.
The resource would make a good introductory lesson to this word class for primary age students (perhaps years 4, 5, 6) or early secondary age students who need a reminder (year 7).
This is a 35-slide series of lessons for the Edexcel English Literature A level course on the poetry anthology ‘The Great Modern Poets’.
The resource introduces modernism briefly and then contains individual lessons for the six poems of Robert Frost’s in the anthology:
The Runaway
Mending Wall
Stopping by woods
Mowing
The Road Not Taken
Out, out-
Engaging YouTube videos are linked, there are a variety of discussion questions about language, form and structure and key context is provided.
I have also drawn on online web articles (contained within) as a stepping-off point for discussion - mainly from the Poetry Foundation website, which I found very useful in teaching this scheme. Links to the original articles are included.
Note that for ‘Out, out -’, there is only a one-slide brief for a student presentation, rather than the more in-depth, discussion-based material provided for other poems.
An introductory lesson aimed at Year 7 students on dystopian writing. The resource could be used with students in 5, 6 or 8 too, dependent upon ability.
The lesson begins by deconstructing the etymology of the words ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ and is then made up of a series of tasks on identifying, analysing and using nouns and noun phrases in relation to an extract from The Beach by Alex Garland. At the end of the scheme, students will use their learning to write a part of a dystopian story.
Two separate starter activities are included in case you would like to spread the material across two lessons. There should be enough material to do so.
Other lessons in the sequence will follow as they are completed.
A wide-ranging lesson which introduces the sonnet form through creative writing and comprehension questions about Barrett Browning’s use of it.
I really liked the well-known resource ‘What’s a sonnet miss?’ (a poem about how sonnets are written), but found it too inaccurate. So, I have written and included my own sonnet about sonnets called ‘What’s a sonnet sir?’.
Also included are comprehension questions which focus students on language and context, as well as a simple outline for an essay on the topic of the poet’s presentation of love.
I found this an engaging and accessible way to introduce the Eduqas GCSE poetry anthology to my year 9 students. However, the lesson would work for any syllabus with Sonnet 43 on it.
Up to two lessons’ worth of content on Wilfred Owen’s poem Exposure.
This was created and delivered to a middle-ability Year 8 class and provides a number of engaging activities including:
Storyboarding
Descriptive writing
Language analysis (focusing on the presentation of nature, not war)
Diary entry imaginative writing
AI generated imagery has been used in this lesson, making it very visually pleasing.
A presentation which considers some advanced aspects of the context, form and structure of John Keats’s To Autumn. It then provides discussion / comprehension questions for the language in each stanza. The resource is suited for more able GCSE learners (i.e. those following the Eduqas specification) and A level Literature students who have selected Keats as their pre-1900s poet.
A lesson which focuses mainly on building students discussion of AO2 (language analysis) through group work. Therefore, I have included no context and only a little reference to structure. My students seemed to really enjoy the lesson.
The cover image and another image in the resource were created using AI.
An updated version of this lesson, now containing a web quest and group tasks on the form and structure, and imagery in John Keats’s O Solitude. The lesson is designed for A level students studying Edexcel English Literature.
It is highly visual and engaging. At the end of the PowerPoint are the previously used slides containing key contextual information, which are useful for reference and revision.
Contained in this resource are a PDF document and PowerPoint version of display material and quote banks for each major character in Of Mice and Men.
The quote banks are divided into four sections according to some of Steinbeck’s main themes and feature a small AI-generated image of the relevant character in the top right. Students can then populate the quote banks with key quotations for each character as they relate to the key themes.
Please note: the quote banks are blank for students to fill in.
The last slides/pages of the resource contain much larger versions of the AI images (one example can be seen in the cover image), which can be printed in colour and used for display.