This activity can be done in class or set as homework. It was inspired by 'Skellig' and a good opening idea is to show the students David Almind's opening description of the garage. However, it works fine as an independent task. Students have to imagine they are Michael, the lonely and isolated boy described walking through the family's old garage at the start of the novel. The task develops language range ad descriptive skills. Suitable for junior ages and also as extension work for those taking entrance or end of year exams. Could also work well for AQA GCSE students ending to perfect their descriptive skills.

A thorough and attractively designed handout which introduces students to the idea of a lierary motif and gives examples of them in 'Skellig'. Opportunities for extended work and homework. Please do see my other Skellig resources in my hop, 'The Full English'

Ideal learning resource to help students consolidate their understanding of the poems. Contains differentiated questions, interesting contextual background information and a range of useful technical terminology. All fifteen anthology poems are covered in detail, making this an ideal purchase for revision sessions and for follow-up homework tasks, or for a takeaway resource pack for the students to work through as revision at home. That’s great value, as many resources charge several pounds for just one poem. It is a handy resource as the questions essentially revise key concepts with the students. The poetic terms can also form the basis of a useful revision test. The background of each poet, their contextual significance, focus work on key lines and useful ‘higher tier’ terms are all included. Each poem benefits from a series of probing study questions. Also included is a detailed glossary of poetic terminology, including less well known and more advanced terms,- ideal for helping your students gain sharper definition and precision in their poem analysis.

HUGE pack of FIVE DETAILED resources for you to choose from. Do all the scheme or just the key descriptive task with 4 supporting files. This is an ideal scheme of work and rich resource bundle for students of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ or, indeed, any other story which has a sequence set in forests or the wild outdoors. Also works great as a forest-themed stand-alone descriptive writing unit across KS3 and 4. The pack contains: What makes a good story?’ strips that students are invited to rank in order of importance out of 12. Helps them isolate the key ingredients of good writing. A PowerPoint slideshow summarising descriptve writing, with lots of useful technical terms and detailed examples to inspire them! The slideshow also explores other possible topics, using fairgrounds as examples, but this could be quickly adapted. A clear 2-sided task sheet inviting the students to imagine that, like Helena (or any other character you want!) - you too are stranded all alone in the enchanted forest. The sheet has a model opening paragraph to help get the students started. Lots of images to inspire them. A great little ‘forest story’ grid game, which you just print out in colour and laminate. This is used to do the paired creative ‘forest writing’ task and supports the PowerPoint, if you don;t have time for the students to make their own grids, as suggested in the slideshow! A handy vocabulary sheet with words and phrases for forests, darkness and light, covering adjectives, nouns, verbs, metaphors, similes, personification and symbolism. The sheet really helps them focus and broadens their expression.

This is an ideal pack for anyone wanting to encourage their students to read widely and perhaps try a different range of books. It is aimed at KS3 age students, mainly year sevens and eights. However, it is just as useful for aspiration Commin Entrance exam students who are keen to brush up on book knowledge prior to interviews. The project can last several weeks and is ideal as both extension or class work activity. The pack contains a useful letter home to parents asking them to support their child with the project, focus tasks on all aspects of the chosen book, tipsnon what makes a good read and a great speaking and listening debate activity- which book would you save from destruction, and why?

This is a set of a range of key scenes and likely exam question scenes for the students to revise. Clear, uncomplicated and well designed. Lots of detailed and academic notes on at least ten of the key speeches and soliloquies, complete with cross-textual links, scene links and definitions of tricky language. The cross textual links are really handy as I provide the act and scene references for words, images and ideas which link out to the focus scene. I also contextualise each extract in depth, helping students focus on these key assesment objectives.

It's hard to find good teaching resources on gender biases within written texts, which is why I created these. I used them in an observed lesson and there is enough material here to fill a double, or you could do one text a period. The pack contains: a full slideshow which introduces the topic, explores ideology with fun examples and cartoons, asks differentiated questions and spgets students thinking about the topic. It also has task guideline slides to steer them through their exercise. This is to work through a series of newspaper and advisory texts which may reveal gender bias. Students are encouraged to use linguistic terminology and frameworks. The slideshow also has answers at the end, which helps students improve their textual analysis and annotation skills as they get to see what they missed. The texts themselves are hilarious, especially the tabloid ones! If you teach in a single sex school, this one's a must! Bound to excite good discussions!

Designed to give students a good overview of the historical Richard as well as Shakespeare's own exaggerated and distorted play version. The slides go through the key political details, explain who Richard was, then show students how Shakespeare adapted him for the stage. Clear and lots of targeted questions.

This pack focuses on all the difficult aspects of each scene, Language, character and theme. Lots of demanding questions and certainly an ideal pack for revision.

Great PowerPoint which guides students through a range of heroes and villains, then sets up a task where they have to write a short description of a character of their own. Included is a sample piece of creative writing; a description of a dastardly Gothic villain. Full of exciting images and ideal for younger kids. I've taught this to year 7-9, GCSE students as a fn starter, and even as an enrichment class to local schoolchildren from feeder primaries. It always works and is guaranteed to produce fun responses!

Contains: poetic terms knowledge checklist to use as a starter, the main lesson in PowerPoint, including questions and tasks, copy of the poem with some brief context included on the sheet and finally, a set of group work tasks. I created these for another lesson ob. It works well if you show the PowerPoint after you have assessed how many poetic terms the students know (see file for this) and before you get them to read the poem. The slides work as parts of the lesson with Q &A sections on them. Other resources offer students background info on St George and the dragon and on the painting. Overall, a high quality detailed lesson which makes for a great introduction to an enjoyable poem: everything's prepared and ready to go.

Useful resource for those teaching this great story. Helps build confident student readers.

Useful and compact overview of the speech, language features used and their effectiveness. Covers the more complex terminology so a good little extension resource.

An ideal pre-prepared lesson with some great ways to introduce your students to the delights of gothic horror. The files include a copy of the short story, focused lesson plan and a useful glossary list of archaic vocabulary, to help students understand the trickier sections of the story. A great set of resources. Please also see my shop’ s ‘What is the Gothic genre?’ PowerPoint file, and my ‘The Gothic’ slideshow, aimed at older students.

Fun and enjoyable resource. Please see my other 'Skellig' resources in the 'Full English' shop. I teach the grammar through literary texts. 'Skellig' is very descriptive so is an ideal way to teach students about the differences between nouns, verbs, adverbs and so on.

A thorough and detailed overview of this interesting strand of the story.

A very thorough and detailed resource which defines difficult terms, provides students with a range of fun and varied examples and explores gender bias in speech and carefully sourced written texts. The scanned pdf is fine and readable, but is an early ‘work’ from when I examined the A level, so is a little old and not full of fancy images and video clips. However, it is a complete teaching pack, ideal for a teacher having to plan this fascinating unit at short notice. I am currently uploading a range of recently created Language and Gender resources this month, so do follow me.

These sheets are all you need to create a challenging yet enjoyable lesson. Kids love this task as it enables them to legitimately insult one another whilst following thes elearning objectives: 1) How to write and Shakespearean phrases, use new vocabulary, use the grammatical structures and create word coinages. 2) Mastering the archaic vocabulary with their partners. 3) How to deliver short but effective lines dramatically, ad-libbing and varying according to context. I've used this with boys studying 'Henry V' (English troops insulting French ones and vice versa) with girls students studying 'Richard III' (Lady Anne and Richard trade insults) - and for students of 'The Tempest'. Students can, if they wish, adapt their language choices for a particular play. Caliban and Prosero's language is a mix of magical and eloquent for Prospero, with more nature-themed curses for Caliban, whereas the historical plays can bring in more historical, supernatural and military language.