Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
Before having children I was Head of KS3 English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a teacher and I loved planning lessons and creating exciting resources.
This exam question PEE plan is applicable to all questions on AQA's English Literature Paper 1. It allows a space for the question, and then separates it off into the two bullet points, then allowing students space to plan their PEE paragaphs.
Students find this plan very clear and simple to use. It allows them to organise their thoughts and plan a coherent exam response.
Ask your students to graph the build-up of tension in each act. Differentiation would include asking students to add quotes to their graph or illustrate pictures to help their understanding.
In this lesson students revisit the features of gothic stories before identifying them in an extract from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Students are then told that they'll be re-telling a popular nursery rhyme in the gothic genre. They are shown examples of Jack and Jill in the 'romance' genre and then the 'gothic' genre to give them an idea of how a nursery rhyme can be adapted. Students then choose and nursery rhyme and have a go themselves.
From personal experience, students absolutely love this activity and it really gets their creative juices flowing. It allows for very rich, high quality descriptive writing. This lesson is compatible with all abilities, but very successful with high ability KS3 students.
This is a 6-7 week scheme of work that can be adapted to suit your needs, but it basically leads students up to pitching their idea for a new type of fast food restaurant. Essentially, it leads up to a very engaging speaking and listening assessment.
Students must learn to work in a team with different roles. They must learn to delegate tasks based on students' differing abilities. The SOW involves mind mapping, problem-solving and decision-making. Having done this SOW with students before, it really does get their creative juices flowing. They end up taking it very seriously and really do think about their restaurant's brand name, slogan, logo, target audience, USP, appropriate location etc. The competitive element of the SOW really engages boys as well. Not only do students hone their speaking and listening skills, but they gain a basic understanding of how to create a business that will be successful when considering several different factors.
The SOW is all included within the PowerPoint with 'notes' added to most slides to be completely self-explanatory. The PowerPoint contains 31 slides, which are very easy to follow and tell students exactly what they need to do.
GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS:
Accent
Adjacency pairs
Back-channel features
Blend word
Contraction
Deixis / deictics
Dialect
Discourse markers
Elision
Ellipsis
False start
Fillers
Hedge
Idiolect
Interactional talk
Initialism
Jargon
Micropause
Non-fluency features
Overt prestige
Paralinguistic features
Phatic talk
Prosodic features
Received Pronunciation
Repairs
Slang
Sociolect
Standard English
Tag question
Transactional talk
Transcript
Turn taking
Utterance
Vague language
INSTRUCTIONS FOR ACTIVITY:
Cut out these dominoes and laminate them (optional). Give individuals or pairs one domino, including you, the teacher.
You begin by reading out the definition on the yellow side of your card. The student who has the term on the blue side of their card that matches with your definition then puts up their hand and says their term out loud. They then read aloud the definition on the yellow side of their card. All class members will have to listen carefully to see if their term matches with the definition they’ve just heard, and so the game continues until it goes full circle, every student has spoken, and you eventually hear the definition that matches with the term on the blue side of your card.
Essentially, you’re playing a large game of dominoes, where students have to match key terms with definitions they hear. Depending on your group’s knowledge/ability, you may work altogether to match up the terms with definitions, or, alternatively, you may decide to play this as an actual dominoes game on the floor.
This is a great 10-minute starter that really helps students to remember key terms and their definitions.
Here's a fun plurals starter with a competitive element - bound to engage the boys!
In 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' style, this activity asks students to pluralise different words. As the monetary amount increases, the words get more and more difficult. For example, the £100 word is 'face', the £16,000 is 'goose', the £125,000 word is 'quiz' and the £1,000,000 is 'ox'. There are two versions of the game to play on two separate occasions; the second round takes students from 'house' (£100) to 'stimulus' (£1,000,000).
This is a fun, competitive starter that engages students in plurals - incredible!
This will ultimately be a revision aid for students studying texts through a narrative lense. They are asked to break a text down into its narrative building blocks and create a summary for each narrative block. On the actual resource there are prompts for each building block to help elicit a response.
THE 7 NARRATIVE BUILDING BLOCKS:
SCENES AND PLACES
TIME AND SEQUENCE
CHARACTERS
VOICES IN THE STORY
POINT OF VIEW
DESTINATION
Students are issued with a scenario and asked to represent/show the story from the perspective of any of the people numbered 1-9. They must consider their perspective carefully. Ask themselves what can they see and hear? Write a short account; write in as much detail as your perspective allows.
This activity is a hands-on way of finding out how narrative perspective can alter the narration of a story. This will lend itself well to leading into a discussion about a narrator's point of view and reliability of narrators.
This is an excellent, fun and challenging quiz to do with secondary school students in an English lesson. This quiz tests students’ knowledge of children’s and teen literature. There are 52 opening lines - one for every week of the year - for students to try and identify. Students must decide which story the opening line comes from. Depending on your students’ ability, you can use the optional clues provided on each slide, available simply by clicking ‘clue’ on each slide. You can also challenge students to not only guess the story’s title but also the story’s author. There is plenty of scope for differentiation. Some notes for how to complete this activity are included in the ‘notes’ section the PowerPoint slides.
Sample opening lines:
“All children, except one, grow up.” - Peter Pan
"Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy." - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
“I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.” - Skellig
"My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue.” - Twilight
“Sophie couldn’t sleep. A brilliant moonbeam was slanting through a gap in the curtains. It was shining right on her pillow.” - BFG
The opening lines range from The Hungry Caterpillar to The Fault in our Stars. This quiz is a fun thing to do at Christmas or at the end of term, or just as part of a reading lesson to encourage students to read by engaging them in the opening lines.
This quiz also offers opportunity for students to discuss which opening lines are their favourites, perhaps encouraging them to seek out the stories to read for themselves.
Using this sheet, students map the rise and fall of Macbeth. They look at phrases used to describe Macbeth in the play. They must find evidence for each phrase. Once finished, this worksheet will illustrate - using quotations - the tragic downfall of Macbeth throughout the play.
GREAT 10-MINUTE STARTER TO CEMENT THE FOLLOWING KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS:
Alliteration
Assonance
Enjambment
Content
Emotive language
Form/
Structure
Imagery
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
End-stopped line
Rhyme
Simile
Stanza
Tone
Voice
Symbol
Rhythm
Personification
Mood
INSTRUCTIONS FOR ACTIVITY:
Cut out these dominoes and laminate them (optional). Give individuals or pairs one domino, including you, the teacher.
You begin by reading out the definition on the yellow side of your card. The student who has the term on the blue side of their card that matches with your definition then puts up their hand and says their term out loud. They then read aloud the definition on the yellow side of their card. All class members will have to listen carefully to see if their term matches with the definition they’ve just heard, and so the game continues until it goes full circle, every student has spoken, and you eventually hear the definition that matches with the term on the blue side of your card.
Essentially, you’re playing a large game of dominoes, where students have to match key terms with definitions they hear. Depending on your group’s knowledge/ability, you may work altogether to match up the terms with definitions, or, alternatively, you may decide to play this as an actual dominoes game on the floor.
This is a great 10-minute starter that really helps students to remember key terms and their definitions.
This resource offers a comprehensive list of techniques used by the media to influence consumers. This list can be used in a variety of ways. Students could use it to identify techniques used in adverts or they could use it to create their own advert.
There are 15 different techniques listed:
Association
Bandwagon
Beautiful People
Bribery
Celebrities
Experts
Explicit Claims
Fear
Humour
Intensity
Maybe
Plain Folks
Repetition
Testimonials
Warm & Fuzzy
Students need to be in two teams. A volunteer from each team must come to the front. Volunteers must answer a series of questions to try cross the square vertically or horizontally. They’re allowed to ask for help from their team twice. They’re only allowed to choose one person to answer the question.
This resource includes a PowerPoint and a series of 18 questions with answers. Example of three questions below:
F – How do you spell Frankenstein?
C – Who is Frankenstein’s friend? Walton
I – In which city does Frankenstein live? Ingolstadt
Students are to review the play and consider reasons, with supportive quotations, as to whether or not Macbeth should kill King Duncan.
This resource is taken from my KS3 Macbeth SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Place the photographs around the room before the start of the lesson.
Tell students that placed around the room are some of the most iconic photographs ever captured.
Ask students to walk around the room, view the pictures, read the information and decide which one the most powerful impact. Why?
Ask: How important are photographs in newspapers? Do you think it would be possible to run a front page which did not have a photograph with it? Why/why not?
Ask: Are there times when using photographs is not justified?
Ask students to look at the list and decide what they think.
- Pictures taken of celebrities without their permission
- Brutal pictures of people hurt or killed in war or violence (The Falling Man 9/11 and Death in Africa caused controversy)
- Page 3 semi-naked shots
Students to write a short response in their books, giving reasons for their answers.
This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Using the PowerPoint, explain to students the three main types of newspaper writing – news stories, features and opinion pieces.
Students should make notes in their books as you explain to them.
Quick test (slide 6): Ask students to decide whether the headlines are for news, features or opinion pieces. They should explain what clues helped them, e.g. the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’
Issue the three Articles to pairs. Students are to decide which one is the news story, the feature article and the opinion piece.
Students are to read the articles closely. Under the headings of ‘news stories’ ‘features’ and ‘opinion pieces’ in their book, students are to identify word level features in the different types of writing. Display slide 7 on the PowerPoint to assist students. But encourage students to be open-minded about what the find. Differentiation: some features will need explaining. For lower ability groups, delete tricky features as appropriate.
After activity, ask students to explain what language features they're likely to find in a features article/news story/opinion piece?
This resource is taken from my KS3 English Newspaper/Journalism SOW which you can buy from my shop.
Of Mice and Men
Much of the plot in the novel is cyclical, as are the lives of the characters. The story opens and closes in the same place, the men’s lives are a routine of work - earn money - spend money in the flop-house - work, and many of the chapters begin and end in similar ways. There are lots of examples of foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck uses this technique to suggest that the characters couldn’t have avoided their fates – their destinies are inevitable.
The task this resource offers is for students to look below the surface of the text and interpret how Steinbeck is offering clues about what will happen later on in the novel. I am looking for some original responses.
This resource offers a reading question, an essay plan and key word definitions. This essay was used as the reading assessment for a high ability Year 9 group studying Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Essay Question:
Starting with this speech, explain how far you think Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a tragic hero.
Assessment Objectives
A01 – Maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response, and use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations.
A02 – Analyse language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate
A03 – Show understanding of the contexts in which texts were written
A04 – Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation.