This lesson is reflective and suggests ways of editing the creative work done over the course of the Macbeth scheme of work

This lesson gives students the chance to act out the final fight and then consider what the aftermath of the action might be with a selection of creative tasks to choose from.

This has 3 suggested speech-writing exam tasks. No frills.

This lesson is aimed at GCSE/iGCSE students and has a choice of writing tasks. One of them is a bit silly (writing to granny about your potential inheritance) but the other is a realistic GCSE style question. It has all the basics of letter writing.

This lesson focuses on how to write the Q4 analytical task on one of the Edexcel iGCSE exam anthology texts. It suggests strategies and uses ‘Young and Dyslexic? You’ve got it going on’ as the example text.

Useful resource for thinking about epigrams in The Importance of Being Earnest

This double page has a summary of ways to write a good creative writing assessment as well as a couple of tasks. It produced great work.

This lesson guides students through the way early novels were titled and imitated travellers’ tales. There’s a comprehension exercise on an extract and a creative task.

This lesson has lots of examples of differing tone in transactional writing and suggests ways for students to adapt their writing tone for transactional writing tasks. It includes a task, written from notes provided.

Useful context about the theatrical world Wilde wrote for, contemporary stereotypes and ideas, genres and influential plays.

This lesson suggests themes and context to go with the study of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

My annotations for the iGCSE exam antology text ‘from The explorer’s daughter’

My own annotations for the iGCSE exam anthology text ‘A passage to Africa’

Lesson on writing dialogue that sounds real and is funny. Was originally based on a family meal extract from ‘Black Swan Green’ by David Mitchell, so do use that if you can! I removed it for copyright reasons.

A powerpoint to do a Whoosh activity with a class about the overall plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

19 powerpoints to help teach Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Most of the novel is covered in detail but the final sections do not have lessons - I’ve intended students to teach each other about those. A few of the lessons don’t include much but most are very detailed with help on context and interpretation. I’ve made quite a lot of the slides of key passages for students to focus on. I’ve mentioned The Lonely Londoners as a companion text (Edexcel A Level syllabus) but most of the lessons focus on the text itself. There are essay questions from past papers on the Edexcel syllabus as well as ones I’ve devised myself. I’ve also got a handy list of all the questions asked up to June 2023. I’ve included a list of potential themes for the two texts. Quite a few critical essays from EMC are mentioned as well as from the companion to Heart of Darkness which I firmly recommend you buy as a school resource.

Here’s a first lesson based on the opening of Heart of Darkness. It starts with a freewriate based on word from the beginning of the novel, then asks students to consider the context and ends with reflection on how the freewriting helped to understand those first pages. The rest of my scheme of work is available on TES.

This scheme of work on Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen contains 7 core lessons plus a couple of of revision lessons. It includes context and critical material as well as ideas for analytical essays. It will need adapting for whatever your syllabus is but contains lots of lovely stuff on: creating the heroine, character sketching, parodies of the Gothic and the ways lies are used in the plot. There are quite a few EMC articles, including one I wrote on fashionable words used in the novel.

From ‘A Game of Polo with a headless goat’ has not been used for a while on the Edexcel iGCSE exam, so may well be the one in summer 2024. A basic lesson on the non-fiction text, telling students what technical features to look for in annotating. My own notes on the text A lesson on how to approach Q5 with Game of Polo and a text about unusual sports. There are no written exemplars in this pack and it is aimed at fairly high ability students.