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:

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.

What this resource includes: Mnemonic to remember rhetorical, persuasive techniques: MAD FATHERS CROCH How to plan an answer 9 skills necessary in a top answer The mark scheme explained Model answer Model answer, annotated and explained Why exam topics will never be interesting Sample topics and question Here is the beginning of the sample text: Model Answer So you want to get rid of school uniform. Perhaps Daddy and Mummy are rich, rich, rich and you want to show us all your designer gear, parading an endless range of just-off-the-shelf splendour and fashion to make your friends praise you and your rivals sick with envy. Direct address, emotive language, anecdote, rule of three, contrasting pairs, metaphor. Creating an enemy. Or perhaps you love lounging about at home in your sportswear, festooned with the right labels, hats and trainers still with their price tags proudly displayed, a sea of pristine white, kept shop-display neat. Repetition, alliteration, anecdote, emotive language, metaphor. Creating an enemy. Or perhaps you have other tribes: you are a Goth, an Emo, you’re indie, a hipster, you’re a dude, a dudette, a geek, a gangsta, or some other made up group you’re so desperate to belong to in your teenage years before adult life ‘ruins’ it all. Hyperbole, repetition, direct address, rule of three, emotive language, metaphor, alliteration. The opening three paragraphs create an enemy through humour.

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.

This is a brilliant way to improve students’ vocabulary, learn to write great description, and to plot a narrative. Then there is the fantastic bonus that it makes the quotations from the poem truly memorable. Here is the beginning. I hope you like it. Description/ Narrative Based on Storm on The Island Wizened by hope, the old man sits in the waiting room. His mind dives from the cliffs of cancer - yes, the tests will show if it has spread, Mr Stook - it twirls through fear, spins at the thought of nothing, of nothing waiting beyond the dark, of emptiness, and summersaults towards hope, spread before him like a sunlit lake. Perhaps they have caught him in time. He chuckles optimistically to himself, fingers curled in a ball upon his walking stick, his back stooped by the blows of time, the blasts of age, rounded, like a ball. He thinks, “I ought to be easy to catch!”

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.

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.

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

This resource includes: Timing of Questions Paper 1 Exam Tactics Timing of Questions paper 2 Explanation of Grade 8: Critical reading and comprehension Reading skills checklist for papers 1 and 2 Grade 8 Writing Skills Papers 1 and 2 How the Grades 8 and 9 are Calculated 8 Reasons not to read the exam paper first, before you start answering questions The importance of handwriting The importance of spelling The marking tolerance per question, which shows why spelling and handwriting are so important

Here is the beginning: Princess Mathilde and Cupid’s Arrow Mathilde knew she looked amazing. But then it was her duty as a princess. She loved being the centre of attention, loved dressing up: the chiffon and silk; the velvet, the fun of display. She was a girl, wasn’t she? She was sixteen. Her father, the warrior king, McArthur Glen the Great, was a wonderful father, she had to admit, but he was still first and foremost a king. And a king is bound by tradition, much the same as a princess. So, today was Suitor Day, when the 16-year-old princess must begin the long and frustrating selection of a husband. They would compete for her in an archery contest. Problem number one: she was beautiful, but Mathilde didn’t want a husband. Problem number two: the suitors on offer, even if she had been in the market to buy, wouldn’t have made her part with a bag of farthings, let alone gold. Jacob the Just from the McDuff clan was ‘duff’ by name and nature, and ‘Just’ about had a brain, was skinny and ‘just’ barely male.

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 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.

Here’s the beginning. I hope you like it. Dear Bedroom, Two years after my mother died, I think of you. When did childhood end? Was it when I gave the eulogy, told the impossible, hilarious, tragic, extraordinary life she had? There were earlier endings. At five, my grandmother died, and I didn’t speak for a week. You remember me then, in the womb of your white walls, weeping, kicking against the sides, against the tides, against death. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Leaving Spain was another death – when dad left, and mum started dating the bank robber, and the dream of Disneyland died, our savings taking us only as far as Canada – right continent, wrong country. I didn’t say goodbye, or send you a postcard from the border, leaving the sun and crossing into the snows. Nor a photograph, a snapshot of me ballooning to eleven stone: ten years old, and a giant snowball of a kid, out of place. Yes, that was a kind of ending, but really, I think the damage was already done, further back, when you still knew me.

Here is the beginning. I hope you like it. The Act of Killing The killings always happened in bright sunlight. The smell of burning hair brings the first killings straight back to me, and I am five again, thirsty in the hot sun – all of us at break time queuing at the well. No running water. Just down the hill, in a hollow, squatted an open shell of a building– whitewashed walls splashed with blood. Once a month, the snuffling pigs ambled up the path, to the pen. They gathered nonchalantly. Then the show started. First, a hook like a giant question mark was stabbed through a snout. The disbelieving pig was pulled, squealing in shock, and just as suddenly, three shirtless men lifted it. The hook fitted onto a rail above head height. Below, a bucket, for the blood. The screaming pig hung from its snout, legs kicking at the empty air.

This story is based on homophobia. My daughter is bisexual, and training to become a teacher. When I released this on video, I was astonished at the number of English teachers who assumed both characters in the story were dislikable, simply because they are both gay. It is also based on the Daphne Du Maurier extract from the 2017 AQA paper. It keeps exactly the same grammar and sentence structure and punctuation. This means that you can rerun all the 2017 questions using this text, to see if your students have learned anything from doing their mock. Here is the beginning. I hope you like it. Twitter Queen Over the face of her keyboard, Regina began a barrage of abuse, and that was usually the way she spent such a brilliant evening – because a Twitter account, and a poisonous tongue and a quiver of quips are just perfect for some social media trolling on a laptop. As she tweeted the world on the web, swigged her wine with one gulp and spat at her victims in 140 characters, Regina decided she could have sold her mother for a viral tweet, something vindictive and destructive and glorious. Regina gazed down at the screen; her fingers were buzzing and furious, the tweets whipping through the ether lacerated her victims with sarcasm and emojis, and their pathetic replies tweeting about this were drowned kittens. Her eyes were blazing hot, and she imagined the tips of her fingers and teeth could be sharpened with cold, mercilessly steel. There was an exponential trend of outraged followers – it seemed to be exploding out of every screen in the city – and each sought the same target, crying so softly, sobbing in her room. Regina laughed delightedly and shrieked at the 10 best tweets from her followers… she felt almost invincible. Inside her power crazed mind, the whole Internet of users across the planet seemed to worship her blank, airbrushed face.

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.

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.

Brilliant though this resource is, question 1 is only worth 4 marks. So, you will lean the common misconceptions students have with this question that prevents them getting full marks. And there is some really useful stuff you can do with the problem of complex sentences. There is a sample question and model answer. But, I’ve really uploaded this so you can get the bundle of Q 1-4 for the whole reading paper. That really is awesome, and at only £5, is probably the best resource available on the TES for this paper. No, seriously, I really think it is.