A reintroduction lesson that should be taught with the understanding that the students have read the text beforehand. Designed as an entry point into year 13; ideal for new teachers looking to get the measure of a new class (as in my case). I found this lesson particularly useful when combined with FAR marking the material surrounding the quotations. You should view this as a starting point - future lessons will get much more specific.

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...

One of my old schools did a great job of communicating with their feeder Primary Schools. We would be invited in to teach the incoming Year 7s. We took this a stage further by collaboratively teaching lessons with people from other departments. This lesson is designed to be taught to Year 6 students and combines Art and English. It's quite easy to change this to meet the needs of your own school's transitional needs. You'll need to download some Manga style pictures and also, somewhat unsurprisingly, you'll need Art resources too.

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 the opening of My Polish Teacher's Tie.

An introductory unit suitable for Year 7 students - I taught it to top and bottom set (with differentiation) classes. It is designed to get kids using the basic PEE style structure to create a reading assessment-worthy response. I don't include all of the extracts I used - I photocopied straight from the texts in all honesty - but this is more than enough to get going. Hope you find this useful.

A few things first: the mock exam can be found elsewhere on in my resources and I base the lessons off a similar series of lessons focused on Anil. The difference here is that these lessons are very much targeting higher ability students - all of the success criteria draws from the top end of the mark criteria. I found this series of lessons to be really useful as a way of establishing the skills required to answer each of the Section A questions. The lessons focus less on exam strategy and more on understanding what is required in relation to each question. The kids found it useful.

A talking mock lesson (two hours long) with strategies on the slides for the students to refer to and time limits identified. The idea is that prior to each question, you are to remind students of how to answer the question. The expectation is that the class will have attempted a Paper 1 Section A beforehand - this is the lesson where they try and beat their previous scores. A quick word of warning: the exam paper is available elsewhere in my shop.

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 couple of lessons that focus on improving creative writing skills. I allude to tasks that have already been completed by the students - you can easily edit these to reflect your own tasks. Particularly pleased with the descriptive writing task as it got a bunch of lads who don’t “do” creative writing to talk about their feelings.

This uses a format I’ve used elsewhere. The lessons are designed to support the teaching of conflict poetry from WW1. The goal is that the students sharpen their reading skills and get a boost in their English lessons where the poet is the subject of focus.

Designed to be taught in support of a Year 9 class doing a GCSE-style task on Of Mice and Men. These powerpoints make good activities as part of a lesson, or they can be printed off as individual worksheets. The worksheet element contains a RAG rating system and some generic targets, suited for peer or self assessment.

These resources assume prior knowledge on the part of the students - they will have covered the greater majority of the texts before hand. The lessons go back and fill in the gaps. I try a few different things here in terms of approach. The "Mike and Sophia" extract guide is a guided annotation lesson; I'd be interested to see how classes respond to this.