All my resources are aimed at teaching students to the top, that's the USP! You can find them on the UK's second largest English teaching channel, Mr Salles Teaches English, and also see how I deliver them there. If you want to be an even better teacher, try The Slightly Awesome Techer, https://amzn.to/2GtQu6l
All my resources are aimed at teaching students to the top, that's the USP! You can find them on the UK's second largest English teaching channel, Mr Salles Teaches English, and also see how I deliver them there. If you want to be an even better teacher, try The Slightly Awesome Techer, https://amzn.to/2GtQu6l
Quite simply, there is no more comprehensive guide to how to teach these 4 questions.
It includes advice for students on each question, the mark schemes, sample questions, sample answers, plenty of fresh texts to practise on, a glossary of terms, how to move beyond PEE paragraphs and, if you are in the mood for more, over 30 English jokes.
All in Word, for you to edit and reproduce as you please.
And all for an unbelievably good price.
What this resource includes:
10 Steps: Just tell me what to do
Sample Question
4 Student misconceptions
The marks scheme explained
Exam tactics
Glossary of terms: 15 of them, with 3 examples of each
Sample texts: The 39 Steps, by John Buchan, CHAPTER ONE, The Man Who Died
Sample texts: Call of the Wild, Jack London, Chapter I. Into the Primitive
11 techniques to teach from these extracts
What does the examiner really want?
Model Question
Model Answer
Colour coded Model Answer to show how to get rid of PEE paragraphs and write like an expert
The Magic Finger: the technique for finding quotations to write about
14 Skills common to questions 3 and 4
What This Resource Includes
15 Steps: Just tell me what to do
The mark scheme
Sample question
Examiner’s Advice
10 ways to think about structure
How to write about the structure of an ending
Extract of the ending of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
How to work out Dickens’ purposes as a writer
Sample Question
Sample Answer
Text based on Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
Understanding the context of historical texts
Sample text: The Doll’s House, by Damon Runyon
How to analyse the structure of each of the 10 paragraphs of The Doll’s House
Model Answer getting 100%
Model Answer rewritten to 300 words, and still getting 100%
12 things to learn from the model answer
How to edit your answer to improve your writing, using far fewer words
7 techniques to reduce your word count
10 great jokes
What This Resource Includes
11 Steps: Just Tell Me What to Do
Sample Question
What the mark scheme says
Why students should always write about complex sentences
How to write great complex sentences in students’ own writing
How to write about contrast and juxtaposition
Model text, based on Brighton Rock
3 Further texts for practice: Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, Household Worlds extracts
Model Answer, to get 100%
Model Answer which can be written in the 12 minute time limit, to get 100%
15 skills to learn from the model answer
How to move on from PEE paragraphs so students can write more in fewer words, and sound like an expert
10 great jokes
What this Resource Includes
6 A4 pages:
7 steps: just tell me what to do to get 100%
Sample question
Sample Text
Model answer
Explanation of the mark scheme
4 Common mistakes which students make
4 great jokes
Students struggle to create interesting plots and characters.
This story and presentation shows students how to use a celebrity they know a bit about, and choose a moment of crisis in their lives.
Yes, it covers all the usual techniques we all teach: alliteration, simile, metaphor, the senses, etc.
But it also pays particular attention to:
Repetition
Allusion
Powerful Verbs
Contrast.
Overdoing some techniques
Minimising adjective and adverb use
Showing the character's state of mind.
Each paragraph has 3 explicit teaching points.
You get two copies of the story - one as a Word document for you to customise or read.
The other, in Word, to teach each of three explicit points for each paragraph.
This resource teaches students how to take even ordinary people they know and shape a story round them.
Teach 7 techniques which guarantee a good story.
It shows them how to structure what they know so that it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
It illustrates how to craft the ending with a twist.
It provides the full short story, as well as questions to help students realise how it is put together, so that they can plan and write their own.
The story is also provided in Word form, so you can adapt it for your class, or annotate it with them, or print it for them.
Teach students how to write about sentence forms.
How to narrow this down to complex sentences, and see why nearly any description will have a list.
How to write about the effect on the reader.
See three texts which use complex sentences in a list.
Teach students how good writers use complex sentences with contrast to manipulate the reader’s thoughts or feelings.
Apply this to the specimen papers.
This powerpoint covers comprehensive themes:
Ambition, Masculinity and Cruelty, The Divine Right of Kings, Tyranny, The Psychology of Guilt, Fate, Prophecy and Free Will, Violence, and The Ambiguity of Reality.
There are a range of quotations for each theme, from different characters’ perspectives.
Each slide has engaging images which should help to make your teaching memorable.
An in depth approach to each slide is also available in my free videos on YouTube. You can find over 600 useful videos at
Or follow the link to the precise video on Macbeth’s themes.
This powerpoint teaches 5 key skills which are necessary to get full marks when writing about the structure of the text. The resource includes a full 8 mark answer, with annotations and explanations of how the answer meets all the criteria for Grade 9.
This appears in both PPT and Word form, so is fully editable, and can easily be printed so that students can easily make relevant notes based on your teaching.
This very focused PPT takes an extract from Bleak House to show you 7 secrets of Dickens' description, including how to use contrast, why metaphor and personification trump metaphor, the power of listing and the subtlety of alliterative sound and rhythm.
When we look at marking criteria we tend to befuddle the students with lists of descriptive techniques. Notice that listing, rhythm and contrast probably don't make it onto most teachers' lists, but these are the most powerful ways of improving their description.
The kind of all writing techniques, or indeed the queen, is the use of the right verb. Dickens masters that too. The resource will also be linked to a video you can use to teach this, or plan your teaching from. Also included is the extract from Bleak House in Word.
Learn the 12 techniques my students used in getting grades 8 and 9 in the 2017 exams.
Use these to show students what to do, rather than refer to wordy and ambiguous mark schemes.
Use a PPT with highlighted paragraphs of the full essay, all coded with the 12 techniques.
See which 3 skills are demanded of the best conclusion.
Also included is the whole essay in Word.
This PPT is linked to 10 videos on my YouTube channel, Mr Salles Teaches English, so you can see how it works. The idea is that students learn exactly how to analyse an extract, and how to link it to the rest of the novella. Moreover, the quotations analysed and the links made will fit any extract question from any other of the 9 chapters.
This comprehensive analysis of all 5 questions breaks down AQA Paper 2 into a series of very clear do's and don'ts that students and teachers can easily follow.
Examples accompany the advice. The PowerPoint slides are all linked to videos on my YouTube channel, Mr Salles Teaches English, so it is much easier to see how to apply the advice.
There are 59 ppt slides giving historical context, quotation and interpretation to five key purposes Stevenson may have had in the novella:
1. to tap into the Victoria psyche and fascination with crime and violence
2. to expose the hypocrisy of the middle classes, who he sees as morally corrupt
3. to question the role of God and Christianity
4. to examine the possibility that we are all, at root, simply animals, without a soul.
5. to suggest the homosexuality should not be a crime.
Students who understand all of these will almost inevitably be able to access grades 7 and above.
You can also find accompanying videos for each of these viewpoints on my YouTube channel, Mr Salles Teaches English, to accompany the slides.
This complete scheme of work teaches students through:
Lesson activities to develop the skills of reading and writing
Examiners's advice as well as the criteria
Links to demonstration videos
Ways to improve spelling and punctuation
Assessments
Model answers of varying quality for students to assess and improve
A teaching sequence to use and remember Rhetorical techniques
A mnemonic to remember these techniques: AH!FASTERCROCH
A PLC (Personal Learning Checklist)
This resource is a copy of the student essay, done under timed conditions.
They will learn more from this if you give it to them to edit and improve, so that it is 1. a perfect story. 2. a perfect description, which does not become a narrative.
There is a powerpoint to teach the 12 techniques which make it a top answer.
This is a comprehensive resource to teach your students how to get 100% in all aspects of the question. It teaches 11 different skills for the question:
1.Highlight the key words in the question which tell you what to look for
2.Highlight the margin of the part of the text you are told to look at
3.Find quotations as you read
4.Name a descriptive or narrative technique for each quotation you use
(These will always be about imagery – simile, metaphor, personification, alliteration – and then perhaps onomatopoeia, sibilance, synesthesia, assonance, pathetic fallacy)
5.Refer to individual words in the quotation
6.Name their parts of speech – verb, adverb, noun, adjective
7.Find a long complex sentence, especially one with listed descriptions
8.Comment on the effect of contrast or juxtaposition, which will be in any description
9.Relate these quotations to the writer’s purpose, to discuss their effects
10.Use tentative language, like ‘perhaps’ to suggest your interpretation of the effect or purpose
11.Do not write in PEE paragraphs, but sentences which include embedded quotations
It contains several models of how to write about complex sentences, with several practice paragraphs from Kipling, Conrad and Dickens for your students to practise on.
It shows students how to model their own writing on that of other writers, using Brighton Rock. Students get to see why knowing parts of speech is so important to developing their own skills as writers. This then makes the job of writing about the effect of language features so much more easy and explicit for them.
If you want to try without buying, all the PowerPoint is covered in a video at Mr Salles Teaches English, which you can find here:
http://bit.ly/Question2Paper1
This PowerPoint is taken directly from The Mr Salles Guide to 100% in AQA English Language GCSE, which you can sample here:
http://amzn.to/2phxxaS
This story is written to model exactly what students should do to write a story that they can finish within 40 minutes, which is roughly the amount of writing time they get at GCSE. There are no published stories of around 500 words, so I have begun to write my own.
Writing one on a real character takes away the fear of planning - students already know how the story starts.
You get a comprehensive PowerPoint with the story on it.
The first section explicitly teaches skills that English teachers may be ignoring.
a. The Power of Verbs
b. How to introduce the character in an interesting way
c How to use humour, not jokes
d How to build tension using contrast and juxtaposition
e How dialogue must reveal character before plot
f The power of repetition and rule of three, or triplets, in building a rhythm
h Paragraphing for impact
The second half of the PowerPoint teaches more conventional story telling skills, with an additional focus on the importance of sound.
a. Metaphor
b. Similes
c. Personification
d. Alliteration
e. Assonance, Half Rhyme and Hidden Alliteration
Finally, you also get a completely free video on how to teach this at: http://bit.ly/WriteAboutARealCharacter
All the PowerPoint slides are included in the video, so you can see how to teach each skill explicitly. If you would like copies of the story, it is available as a separate resource.
This story is written to model exactly what students should do to write a story that they can finish within 40 minutes, which is roughly the amount of writing time they get at GCSE. There are no published stories of around 500 words, so I have begun to write my own.
Writing one on a real character takes away the fear of planning - students already know how the story starts.
There are three copies of the story:
1. Without any annotation
2. With a key to the annotations which teach a range of skills many English teachers ignore:
a. The Power of Verbs
b. How to introduce the character in an interesting way
c How to use humour, not jokes
d How to build tension using contrast and juxtaposition
e How dialogue must reveal character before plot
f The power of repetition and rule of three, or triplets, in building a rhythm
h Paragraphing for impact
3. With a key to the annotations which teach the more conventional story writing skills:
a. Metaphor
b. Similes
c. Personification
d. Alliteration
e. Assonance, Half Rhyme and Hidden Alliteration
Finally, you also get a completely free video on how to teach this at: http://bit.ly/WriteAboutARealCharacter
The PowerPoint slides which teach this lesson, and which I use in the video are available as a separate resource.