Examining A Streetcar Named Desire as part of the tradition of tragedy.

This lesson asks students to imagine what the characters in the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night might feel and how their clothes tell the audience about them. There’s a creative writing task as well.

Lesson on Act 4 scene 1 of Twelfth Night with creative tasks around Sebastian and Olivia.

This lesson teaches the basics of rhythm and encourages students to write poetry using rhyme and rhythm.

This scheme of work gets students to work towards writing an analytical essay, with a paragraph every couple of lessons building into an essay which includes context and critical comment from other writers. It also has a creative task writing in a teenager-idiom and a poster-making activity based on Holden’s perambulations around New York. There are 8 lessons, each starting with about 10 minutes of reading as a class and then about an hour of activities. Lesson areas are: schools, teenagers, characterisation, travel poster, symbolism, Bildungsroman, catcher of children, critics and finishing the essay.

The balcony scene with place to annotate elements of courtly love.

This lesson suggests how to write analytical comparison of the poems Journal of a Disappointed Man and Please Hold from the Edexcel anthology poems of the decade. Lots of examples of analysis.

Hand-written annotations on the Edexcel iGCSE coursework anthology extract ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you’ from ‘the Woman in Black’.

Summarise the whole of Macbeth in one lesson with a Whoosh. Fun classroom drama activity useful for doing at the beginning of a unit on the play.

My annotations for the iGCSE exam anthology text ‘Between a rock and a hard place’

This lesson gives students some example paragraphs along with the mark scheme and an explanation of what it means. The paragraphs include ones written about ‘A Passage to Africa’ and ‘A Game of Polo with a Headless Donkey’ (likely to be used in summer 2023) as well as ‘Young and Dyslexic’ and ‘The Danger of a single story’.

This lesson (written spring 2023) has a list of the genres used in the Edexcel iGCSE transactional writing questions up to June 2022 and suggests students consider what patterns they can see and focus their revision and practice accordingly. It also includes some past questions to plan as a revision technique.

This is the final lesson in my mini-unit on The Story of an Hour. It’s helpful to have used the previous lessons on women in 19th century literature, annotating The Story of an Hour and prose structural features.

As Out of the Bag is long, I’ve divided it into 2 lessons. Here’s the first. For use teaching the poems of the decade collection for Edexcel

Ths lesson deals with the second part of the poem Out of the Bag by Seamus Heaney. It’s got a key for all the classical allusions, which is worth the price alone!

Useful explanation of scansion and rhythm in poetry.

A revision lesson for students to remind them about how to write about plastic theatre in A Streetcar Named Desire

This lesson examines Material from the Edexcel collection poems of the decade and suggests a comparison with Genetics to get students thinking about comparison