This session uses an extract from The Witcher and is designed to be a fast paced, Fun and engaging, group based session which allows the learners room for self discovery and peer support in order to practice using the skills they have been taught through out the year. This is largely a recap session on Language and Structural features (I have used DAFOREST, POSHIMP and ROW of CLONES but these can be adapted) they have been taught and to prepare them as the exam dates grow close. Designed for paper 1 question 3 of the edexcel exam board but can be adapted to be used with other exam boards. The focus of this session is on the learners to lead the lesson rather than the teacher to feed knowledge and is great as a recap/ exam prep or workshop lesson. Slides from the presentation can be printed and used as handouts or worksheets, are designed to be used with an IWB with room for annotations during group discussions and feedback tasks and come with comments to help delivery. Please keep in mind that the TES preview can distort the look of the resource and this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This is a full GCSE English session which has enough materials to cover 3 hours. This session covers the critical thinking question of the English exam and is adaptable to any exam board. This session slowly builds and presents a scaffold towards to this difficult question through a series of team and paired activities and group discussions which underpin and practice P.E.E answers and writing to describe. There is room for students to learn at a even pace and tasks are structured to stretch and challenge higher achieving students. This session comes with 3 video clips and the extract. You can break this session into 2 sessions or adapt to whatever exam board you are teaching on. Please keep in mind that the TES preview often distorts the look of the resource and this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This resource is excellent for revision, workshop or homework sessions. In current times, it can also be useful for remote / online sessions. This session breakdowns question 4 of paper 1 in a way that both supports the low ability and stretches the more able students. It is designed to calls on each student to actively use their developed knowledge and prior learning to successfully engage with the session. This session is designed with a variety of short build up tasks, larger revision and recall tasks which lead up to the final analytical, examination writing task. The powerpoint is open and adaptable to be used in whichever was works for you. You can add in timed or paired activities if you plan of delivering this session or you can leave it to be used by the student as homework. Please keep in mind that the TES preview does at time distort the look of the resource and tis is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This is a team / group based session designed to not only help students prepare for their L2 FS English writing exam but to also underpin some valuable life skills. There are 7 pages of activities which focus on tone and language when writing to complain, and underpins self awareness and self control. The resources are differentiated so both lower levels and higher achieving students can work together to achieve in this session. The session slowly builds to a final individual task which is to write a formal and tone appropriate letter of complaint, a task similar to one they may find in the exam and can be used as exam preparation or as an introduction to the topic. There are planning scaffolds and word banks to support students in their final writing task. This pack can be edited, broken up into sections and altered to suit you and your student needs. Please keep in mind that the TES preview does at times distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps

Sourcing material for your classes can take up a large proportion of what precious little time teachers have. For this reason I have complied a resource pack of various news articles to use with Functional English or GCSE English Language students. This pack has 10 articles covering 22 pages from a wide range of news outlets such as The BBC, The Metro, The Sun, The Telegraph and many more. The articles cover a wide range of topics from Climate Change, gender identity to homophobia and looks at people such as Greta Thunberg and JK Rowling. The articles vary in length and layout to help reach students of all levels, some are individual articles regarding an individual news story, whilst other news stories have more than 1 article to show how writers create view points or potential bias when covering the news. You are free to use the resources in whichever way fits you and your students. You can create your own worksheets or use the links to project the articles onto an IWB or to show the videos attached. You can use the articles to discuss language, layout, bias, writers view points or to use as a catalyst for class debate. Please be aware that the TES preview can at time distort the look of a resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This is a short and sweet introduction to the P.E.E answer format for GCSE English students. This is a great way to introduce the idea of stories being constructed and designed to make the audience behave / react a certain way. This session looks at a violent scene from The Hunger Games (rated 12A) breaks down a scene and talks about why a director may have constructed a scene in a way to make the audience react a certain way. The final task is for students to use these elements discussed to prompt P.E.E paragraphs. This resource is easy to adapt and can be used in conjunction with other sessions were P.E.E is used. Please keep in mind that the TES preview can distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps.

A small set of starters (or plenaries) to actively promote mental wellness in your students. These small activities are designed to help prompt positivity and ownership of behaviours and attitudes with easy to do activities based on CBT techniques. These are easy to apply to your sessions, can be used as tutorials or to help overcome anxiety in the build up to assessments or exams. Feel free to elaborate upon or change depending on what your class needs are. Hope it helps. Please note that the TES preview can often distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection.

This resource is designed for L2 Functional Skills English classes and covers inference and comparison on a introduction level. The lesson is fast paced and is designed so tasks can be delivered as team activities or individually. The lesson is scaffolded from L1, with inference via images to L2 with compare two different view points via styles of writing. I teach apprentices within a short space of time, so please alter the session to suit your own classes. The test preview at times distorts the look of the resource, so please keep in mind this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps

This is a complete mock paper 2 exam for the AQA English Language 8700 spec. It features all questions from 1 - 5 in the style of AQA , The sources are a twitter war between Perez Hilton and Lady Gaga and a letter written in 1874 by the poet AC Swinburne, both documents tackle the issue of public slander and public arguments. Please keep in mind that the TES preview can often distort the look of the resource, it is not always a true reflection of the how the resource truly appears. Hope it helps

Having taught English over the last 10 years I have witnessed an increase in pressure put on students to achieve grade C’s and above - now grade 4’s and above. I have also witnessed how this pressure makes lower performing students give up in English, leading to poor attendance and behavior . Other students, who try their best, being made to feel stupid or “thick” (as they put it) because they never seem able to do what is increasingly expected of them. Therefore this is a lesson designed to be inspirational and encouraging, which makes it ideal for the start of the academic year and trying to start your students off on a positive mind set in English. It crosses over into something of a tutorial and is a good way to start off the creative writing unit as the final task is geared towards that particular question in the exam. If you are doing regular target setting and target reviews with your students, it is also a great session to begin that process with and allows you to have a starting point from which you can track. This session encourages students to measure their ideals against their actuals. Which is to look at what it is you want to achieve in the future (grades 4 - 9) but measuring the progress against what you did last week / last term etc and visibly seeing the improvements and progress being made. The idea is to encourage a positive feeling towards English and to develop a healthy approach to achievement and what achievement means. It can be used with any exam board as the creative writing task is across all boards. This lesson comes with a full powerpoint - slides of which can be printed and used as worksheets - and a video which ideally needs to be watched from roughly 3 mins in and ended at about 5 mins in ( exact times can be found in the notes section of the PP) If you don’t want to use the video, the point it makes is reinforced by a group task and so you can use either /or - or both. It is full of group and individual activities which can be done without a world of resources at your finger tips - ideal if you multi site in your job. Please note that TES previews can distort the look of the resource and this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps

This session was designed for a L2 student F/S who’s first language wasn’t English but was strong enough to not be put in a ESOL class. They struggled with writing, using a range of vocabulary and sentence structures. This session was designed to try and broaden their skills in this area and their confidence with writing. The session looks at using synonyms, LY / ING sentence starters, language features and descriptive writing techniques such as using the senses to describe. The tasks all combine together to build up to a short piece of descriptive writing, piecing all elements together, with the session ending with a Functional English styled question. This session was designed for a 1-2-1, but can be adapted to suit your own cohorts. Please be aware that the TES preview only gives a sample of the materials and can at times distort them, and this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps

I run 1 hour long support sessions in GCSE English for students who are more vulnerable. I have short and simple sessions to support these students with their learning. This session cover paper 2 question - the compare question and focuses on how to structure an answer (point, quote, infer - you may use a different format). The materials start simply with the analysis of two images and works it way up to two short samples of different era texts. The materials are enough to fill an hour support session, feel free to adapt to suit your own timetable and cohort. Hope it helps

I support vulnerable students with their English with weekly 1-2-1 hour long sessions. The sessions I create are designed to create interest in the student and to revise skills taught in their main session. This session starts with developing Haikus to engage the student and get them thinking of different vocabulary and sentence structures, it is also useful for underpinning spelling techniques and proofreading. We work our way up to L1 reading practice with a piece of text about Frida Kahlo. Feel free to adapt for your own needs. Hope it helps

I support vulnerable students with their Functional English in 1-2-1 hour sessions. The materials I create are designed to be simplified, to support their main learning and be used as revision or guided homework, however feel free to adapt to your own cohort. This session supports the reading paper at L1 and is based around the painting, the raft of Medusa. We start simple and focus and read and obtain questions and work our way up to exam style questions. Hope it helps

This is what I call a “Quickie Workshop”. It is specific to identifying inference and GCSE English Exam answer format (PEE - You may adapt to suit whatever answer format you use with your students". Inference is something students, particularly second language learners, struggle with and it is always worth a re-fresh as much of the GCSE exam does require this skill. This lesson starts simply with everyday phrases and works it’s way up to a book extract and a whole article based around Cheryl Cole’s divorce. It has a supporting grid scaffold to help put the PEE structure together and wraps up with a quick self assessment. This is ideal for half term workshops or tutorials but just as easily can be used as an introduction to inference or fattened out to be a whole lesson with example exam questions. Please be aware that TES previews can distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps.

This resource aims to broaden students knowledge of our history, promote equality and diversity whilst also improving their read / obtain skills and engagement with texts. This resource focuses on the contributions of Sikhs during the two World Wars, as many students are unaware of their participation as it is rarely mentioned in movies and memes and unfortunately, this seems to be where many students get their information. This resource has enough material for an hour and half session but has enough substance to be developed further into any direction you see fit. The focus of the session is primarily E3/L1 read and obtain with some higher level vocabulary slotted in to stretch and challenge. The session also involves a class discussion, a video with task attached , paired and individual activity and is measured via a points system, as in my experience lower level students enjoy being awarded points as they progress in a session. I usually use these types of sessions to try and motivate disengaged students to engage with written text, as many “switch off” when there is text to read or they are required to write something themselves, and so this has been designed for that purpose, however there is room for development to suit your own students needs. Please be aware that the TES preview can at times distort the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps.

We all have those sessions where the students can’t wait to bolt out the door once the session is finished and will hurry through any task to make the class finish quicker. Over the years I have used a wide variety of engaging plenaries to help keep the potential for learning at its max up until the last second of the session. These are a collection of my top 10 that I have successfully used in my sessions. These plenaries come in all shapes and sizes, from group and team tasks, to independent and personal tasks to larger tasks with a competitive edge. You can use these plenaries to reinforce learning from that session or from a whole term, some can be used to assess individual learning and provide feedback on your session and others encourage students taking ownership for their education. Please keep in mind that the TES preview at times distorts the look of the resource and this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps.

We have all had those sessions where the class has been slow to start and a struggle to engage, despite our best efforts. I have put together 10 of my most tried and tested starters which have been the most effective with my learners. These starters are groups and game centered with a competitive element, they peek the learners attention and intrigues them from the moment they sit down. This ensures that your class has a positive and fun reaction / association to your sessions. Some activities are great for recapping previous learning or developing specific skills. These types of starters are also perfect for those sessions where you have the faithful few who always drop in late and disrupt your flow. These starters ensure the class is engaged, so the negative effect of any disruption is reduced and you keep control of the class. This resource gives a break down of each activity along with some sample materials you can use to help get your self started. Please keep in mind that the TES preview at times distorts the look of the resource and this is not a true reflection. Hope it helps

This mini bundle consists of a mini reading activity and writing activity, along with video and video worksheet for L1 English Functional Skills. All resources are based around Greta Thunberg and are designed to be as similar as possible to the layout of the pearson functional skills exam - although they can be altered to accommodate any exam board. The reading paper is based on 1 article about Greta and takes questions as they are presented and worded on the exam. The writing is also presented and worded as it would appear on the exam, so this mini bundle is perfect for any exam prep or to use with lower ability learners. This package also comes with a BBC video and worksheet to accompany it. Please keep in mind that the TES preview can sometimes alter the look of the resources and this is not always a true reflection. Hope it helps

This resource is an introduction to comparing two tasks and the P.E.E answer format to Q13 on the L2 reading paper. The theme of the lesson is “Flat Earth” and contains a Powerpoint, video and related worksheets. This is a quick paced session design for classes which are 2 hours, but can be altered to suit your timetable. Hope it helps