So, this unseen poetry section is quite scary isn't it? This was my way of attacking it with my KS4 students. I used song lyrics to start with, but also looked at some trickier poetic forms . The songs and poems you'll need to independently download are embedded in the lessons .

I've found another use for all that knowledge we have about the old AQA English Lit anthology (The Sunlight on The Grass anthology). I have started to turn them into English Language Paper 1 Section A Mock Exams! This is one of them. There is no mark scheme, but if you use the Paper 1 mark scheme from the AQA website you should be fine. This one uses sections from Compass and Torch - I've stitched together two sections and omitted the bit about the horses (for those who remember) so that the extract focuses only on the relationship between the boy and the man.

One lesson that focuses on getting the students to use more technical vocabulary. Another lesson that tests their understanding and hits them with an exam question at the end. All material is based upon the AQA terminology guide (not included in this pack).

A resource dump for my first attempt at preparing a middle set year 9 class for the rigours of the new GCSE - some success, but the class dynamic was more of a problem than the lesson resources themselves. Some editing may be required, but if you are wondering about how to approach the Section B parts of the exams, this covers a lot of bases.

A unit designed to be taught to Year 7. It introduces them to the basics of the Media and gets them writing creatively - a Travel Brochure. Includes resources and articles.

A simple spreadsheet that is designed to track the progress of an entire KS3 cohort from Year 7 to the end of Year 9. I have LOCKED each of the TABS of the spreadsheet using the NAME OF THE TAB itself (minus the spaces and as it appears with capital letters and numbers). This will stop any of the codes being deleted accidentally. Hope this saves people some time.

There doesn't seem to be much out there for DNA, which is a shame really as it's a great text to study. Attached are ALL of the DNA resources I have created; hopefully this will give you a few different ideas and starting points. This is a mish-mash of resources from three years of teaching this text across two schools. Some organising and sifting-through is needed here.

I had SO much fun with this unit of work! It helped that the TA in my class went on to become a local MP for Labour (still is as far as I can tell...). Essentially, this series of 5 lessons - which, by the way, totally went over the 5 lessons I gave myself to teach this - explores a number of different political speeches. Included in the pack are a number of transcripts - Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Alex Ferguson's farewell speech, Bush's post-911 address to the nation and the transcripts of Clegg, Cameron and Brown from the First Televised General Election Debates (heavy stuff). I was a little tentative at teaching this to a bottom set year 9 class, but they totally got on board with the debates (they tore shreds out of Brown...) and engaged well with the controlled assessment task at the end. I know that the controlled assessments are now null and void (a shame really), but the exploration of speeches might be useful to someone out there in the teaching ether...

A unit of work I did not design, but these are the lessons I created to teach it. The lessons focus on The Tempest and Othello. These lessons were designed to be taught to a bottom set Year 9 class with more interest in staring out of the window than exploring the linguistic delights of the Bard. However, once I started to Story Woosh the plays, the analytical lessons became much more productive.

A complete unit of work including source poems, videos and mp3 versions of poets reading their poems. Differentiated for higher, middle and lower ability classes (each lesson back ground has a slightly different colour for an easy visual guide), this is a unit of work I designed with my Head of Key Stage 3 hat on at my last school - an entire year group was successfully taught this unit. A real success.

5 Lessons and supporting resources that assist with the revision of this particular unit of the AQA English Literature Examination. I cover the following poems (my students identified these ones as the toughies): The Prelude Exposure Remains The Emigree Kamikaze Each poem has a revision style lesson (it assumes prior knowledge of the poem on the part of the student, but they also make good starting points if you are cracking through the poems at a fair old pace). Each poem also has a revision card attached - we use these as tools in their own right, and I will be creating one for each of the poems soon enough. The unit finishes on a GCSE style question where they have to compare Ozymandias to one of the poems they have studied. Hopefully you’ll find this useful.