A full analysis of the purpose and role of violence in the novel, and a grade 9 essay for your students to learn from or retain for the exam.

Students can achieve grade 7 and above just from reading this - they wouldn’t even have to read the novel! When they do, it will make so much more sense to them. They get a very clear summary, linked to lots of top grade interpretations, ready to simply fit into their essay writing.

Every to grade idea you’ll ever need. Boost students’ grades, because top level analysis is just knowing stuff. Understand interpretations you’ve not met before and help your students stand out from the crowd.

Grades 7, 8 and 9 depend on students exploring different interpretations. Focus on why Stevenson, the atheist, writes the novella with Christian themes. Then see how his description of Jekyll undermines these themes, promoting a freer society. Watch the video to see how to get the most out of this PPT, or print it off for your students to take notes on while they watch the video. You’ll also see how Hyde acts as Jekyll’s bravo, and why only Jekyll has a motive to kill Sir Danvers Carew and cause the death of Lanyon. This is also explained by the historical context and the 1885 Act of Parliament outlawing homosexuality. Finally, explore why Stevenson might prefer Hyde to Jekyll and how he chooses to reject England and it’s Christian society to live the rest of his life in Samoa.

This comprehensive and beautiful resource teaches all the themes of An Inspector Calls. It is filled with detail which will help most students access grade 7, and the more able to get grades 8 and 9. It summarises most of The Mr Salles Guide to An Inspector Calls, which you can see on Amazon https://amzn.to/2DDPl91 Each PPT slide can be printed as a revision card there are 32 in total. A video showing you how to teach from it is also included. You can play this to your class, or pick out the salient points you want to cover yourself.

Propel students to top grades in their full understanding of the context of this poem. It is propaganda, we know. But teaching the rhyme scheme and dactyl metre reveals a surprising alternative, that Tennyson is horrified at the senseless slaughter of the soldiers. Students who understand ‘form and structure’ achieve at least grade 7. A video also explains everything, so your students can follow up the lesson with homework, or can use it as flipped learning before you teach the poem.

Not only do you get a great story to teach from, but it is 630 words long, so your students can write the same amount in the exam. Better than that, you can teach how to use the picture as a springboard to writing the story, without them stressing. Crucially, you can teach your students to write a story, under exam pressure, WITHOUT HAVING TO PLAN! The most helpful part is the free video which comes with it, to show you lots of ways of teaching the story to your class. There are 7 useful tips in the video: What’s holding you back in your writing? A fascinating fact about learning to swim and learning to drive, which will help you become a writer! A picture. A story and description. How an expert thinks as they write, which will help you think like an expert. How to have fun in the exam. No, I really mean it! And obviously, how to write a brilliant description or story which will get you full marks (unless you can’t punctuate, but that is another video). As you will see from the extract below, it is particulary useful for teaching boys! “Obviously, the cooler part of my brain, the mixed martial art aficionado part, registered that I was about to get my ticket punched, so obviously I kept on ducking. Unfortunately, as you’ve seen by now, this wasn’t the most active part of my brain and so, like South West Trains, it had arrived a little late, and bam, there it was: fist, face – fiddlesticks.” Although it is in Word, I’ve spaced the paragraphs and font so that it will fill your screen a paragraph at a time, like a PPT.

How do you get a student who is packing their description and narrative with too many adjectives and adverbs to pick them carefully. How do you help them choose when to speed action up, and when to slow it down? Sometimes this feels as though we have to get them to unlearn what we have taught them! It’s hard. But this lesson will help you do that quickly, and in a way your students will understand. A video goes with it, so you can see how I teach it. You also get a copy of the all the writing in Word, so it is easy to edit and print off. It gives the original version, and then the improved version. Also included is the rest of the story, which you an get your students to edit and rewrite in response to your teaching.

Teach from part of a sample answer. Go through the 9 skills that students need for a grade 5. Then teach the same skills to grade 6 using the same essay, with an extra one - skill 10 which tips the balance between grades 5 and 6. Finally, exemplify a crucial tactic to approaching the question which makes grades 5 and 6 so much easier to get. Should students start with the extract or the whole text? There really is a right answer!

Teach all the skills of Question 3 Paper 2 from a short extract. This teaches students how to comment on language features, and relate them to the question, rather than just to name the parts of verb, noun etc. It uses a student’s answer, so that your class can relate to what a student can realistically write - this is a student who began year 11 as a grade 4, and is now at the top of the band. It also highlights in green how an answer should link ideas together, and in yellow what subject terminology actually looks like. Once you have taught the lesson, get students to recreate their own version of the full mark response.

All the themes of Jekyll and Hyde, with precise quotations to teach them. A 42 minute video showing you what to teach if you want it. Great to set for homework. A beautifully presented PowerPoint which you can teach from or print off as revision cards for your class. As always, the presentation links to my videos on Mr Salles Teaches English, so you can get even more tips on how to teach from it. Includes themes of women and femininity, duality, hypocrisy, repression, violence, duality, friendship, appearances, the house as a metaphor, science and evolution, and Christianity, curiosity, drug taking…

This presentation will help you teach the poet’s tone and point of view. It outlines the historical context and the political nature of the poem. It helps you teach the allusions to Macbeth, Ozymandias, Hamlet, and Dulce et Decorum Est, as well as looking at the imagery. Finally, it helps you analyse the poem’s structure and link this to Armitage’s purpose. The accompanying video gives you an indepth instruction on how to link your teaching to the slides.

Use 8 short paragraphs describing Scrooge and the weather to explore how the weather mirrors the changes in Scrooge’s morality and personality. Teach how Dickens also uses contrast, repetition, personification, sibilance, alliteration to signpost the changes in Scrooge’s character. Show how the descriptions of weather in the countryside and the weather reveal Dickens’ attack on the problems of urbanisation and his campaign to persuade contemporary readers to change their attitude to the deserving poor. Teach students how Tiny Tim is a metaphor for Scrooge himself, and how his weak morality is rescued by Christmas and the child within.

AQA likes to test the novel by asking students to compare Pip to another character. This is my top tip for 2018. Students often struggle to find interesting comparisons and fail to write about Dickens’ purpose. This resource introduces four big ideas which will allow your students to write confidently about Dickens’ purpose. It also provides 20 ideas and 20 quotations for them to use in their essay. Most quotations, as you can see, are detailed, so that you can give your students practice in selecting judiciously, and so that they learn to embed quotations in their sentences. Below is a sample of the first 4 ideas:

AQA likes to test the novel by asking students to compare Pip to another character. This is my top tip for 2018. Students often struggle to find interesting comparisons and fail to write about Dickens’ purpose. This resource introduces four big ideas which will allow your students to write confidently about Dickens’ purpose. It also provides 20 ideas and 20 quotations for them to use in their essay. Most quotations, as you can see, are detailed, so that you can give your students practice in selecting judiciously, and so that they learn to embed quotations in their sentences. Below is a sample of the first 4 ideas:

Dickens is a master of his craft, but by God, you can tell he was paid by the word, can’t you? Never was a man so in love with a sentence, loaded with clauses, garnished with phrases and then, to add to the confusion, the main clause tagged on at the end. What 16 year old wouldn’t struggle? I’ve abridged this great novel down to 20,000 words, from 27,000. That’s a quarter less time to read it, and a quarter more time to teach the content. Better than that, it actually makes for a more entertaining read. The conversation feels much more natural, and has some real pace. You can easily have your students taking parts. And of course, none of the essential quotations are left out! Here is a sample:

Dickens is a master of his craft, but by God, you can tell he was paid by the word, can’t you? Never was a man so in love with a sentence, loaded with clauses, garnished with phrases and then, to add to the confusion, the main clause tagged on at the end. What 16 year old wouldn’t struggle? I’ve abridged this great novel down to 90,000 words, from 163,000! So each chapter can be read in 20 minutes or less. That’s a 45% reduction in reading time, which buys you an 45% more time to teach your analysis! Better than that, it actually makes for a more entertaining read. The conversation feels much more natural, and has some real pace. You can easily have your students taking parts. As a bonus, I’ve placed in bold the most important quotation in each chapter. This means your students should find it much easier to make notes, and you can find it easier to decide on key passages to approach in your teaching.