MASSIVE success with this scheme. Trouble is, what I can’t get on here is the music files I downloaded and threaded into the lessons. If you want to do this, use a site like keepvid.com to download some sinister music - I used the little girls song from ‘The Ring’ and a series of songs from the original QUAKE video game soundtrack (one is literally just a whisper getting louder and louder). I played these sounds over the top of the creative writing assessment and got a decent response (true, one or two of the kids MAY have nightmares…). Best of luck!

My school was fortunate enough to get Dr Kate Evans in to talk to our top set year 8 students as part of our Africa Week. These lessons were created to support her presentation and would be suitable (with some modification) for an end of term activity or, as in our case, as part of a whole year group activity in support of a special event week. I include the link to Elephants for Africa below should you wish to get in touch with this most worthwhile of charities. http://www.elephantsforafrica.org/

A powerpoint lesson designed to be taught either AFTER a class has sat AQA English Language Specimen Paper 4, or to be used WHILST a class is sitting the same paper in the form of a mock exam where feedback is given immediately. In this powerpoint, I refer directly to the model material provided by AQA and provide some feedback that can be given to the students. The idea with the feedback is that the person marking (teacher or student) writes down the letter/number and, when the marked work is returned, the owner of the response can either write the target down in full or highlight it in a printed version.

My third lesson. This is designed to be a lesson where I as the teacher give less and the students give more of their own ideas - the group is reluctant to communicate. As a result, it is less "idea heavy" and far more task focused - you'll get a lot of markable material out of this.

A unit designed to be taught to Year 7. It introduces them to the basics of the Media and gets them writing creatively - a Travel Brochure. Includes resources and articles.

A bank of lessons and extracts that introduce Key Stage 3 to a variety of different 19th Century Literature texts. Designed with a top set year 8 class in mind. Draws heavily from the AQA material - look at this as either a time-saver or a starting point. ADDITION: These lessons are intentionally “light” in terms of their content - the main aim of this unit was to get the students to read the extracts and to ask questions about them. As a result, the lessons I’ve built contain gaps that allow me to react to the needs of the kids. If your intention is to purchase these lessons, please recognise that you will need to fill these gaps yourself. The lessons were only ever intended as a starting point.

A lesson I've used in the development of my students' essay responses. Our school were also fortunate enough to find a theatre company that was able to come and perform versions of the Shakespearean plays we needed of them. This lesson was taught before hand and gave the students the pause for thought necessary for them to take on board valuable ideas surrounding contextual interpretations. The web address for the Much Ado About Theatre Company is below: http://www.muchadoabouttheatre.com/ Use them and the resource with freedom and may the odds of AQA marking be ever in your favour... UPDATE: I have modified the lesson to include images of the MAAT cast acting out parts of Romeo and Juliet. Seriously,by the way, get these guys in! They do a workshop with your kids that focuses specifically on the AQA Literature paper!

Numerous lessons (though as you’ll see they can be expanded/contracted as meets your need) surrounding the teaching of Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights (a quite awesome book) to a Key Stage 3 class. I taught this unit to a top and bottom set and got a lot out of it in terms of enjoyment and successful creative writing. I will be using it as a starting point for a reading assignment with very little modification. May your daemon guide you well. ADDITION: I have adapted the material to be more focused on GCSE Language creative skills, and incorporated material drawn from the BBC series His Dark Materials. The “newer” lessons are aimed for higher ability students and deal with some more specific creative writing issues like dialogue.

I designed this for the old AQA specification. Now that the spec is obsolete, some of you might be thinking of turning those stacks and stacks of anthologies into resources for KS3 classes (we certainly are for year 9). As a result, you may find this booklet useful. The booklet is essentially a copy of the entire anthology where on the left hand side of a double page spread you have the text, and on the right hand side you have space for notes. Each story is ended with generic questions and has TWO exam questions for revision purposes. Perfect for planning lessons when you are taking an extended period of time off. Happy reading.

One of my old schools did a great job of communicating with their feeder Primary Schools. We would be invited in to teach the incoming Year 7s. We took this a stage further by collaboratively teaching lessons with people from other departments. This lesson is designed to be taught to Year 6 students and combines Art and English. It's quite easy to change this to meet the needs of your own school's transitional needs. You'll need to download some Manga style pictures and also, somewhat unsurprisingly, you'll need Art resources too.

There doesn't seem to be much out there for DNA, which is a shame really as it's a great text to study. Attached are ALL of the DNA resources I have created; hopefully this will give you a few different ideas and starting points. This is a mish-mash of resources from three years of teaching this text across two schools. Some organising and sifting-through is needed here.

I had SO much fun with this unit of work! It helped that the TA in my class went on to become a local MP for Labour (still is as far as I can tell...). Essentially, this series of 5 lessons - which, by the way, totally went over the 5 lessons I gave myself to teach this - explores a number of different political speeches. Included in the pack are a number of transcripts - Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Alex Ferguson's farewell speech, Bush's post-911 address to the nation and the transcripts of Clegg, Cameron and Brown from the First Televised General Election Debates (heavy stuff). I was a little tentative at teaching this to a bottom set year 9 class, but they totally got on board with the debates (they tore shreds out of Brown...) and engaged well with the controlled assessment task at the end. I know that the controlled assessments are now null and void (a shame really), but the exploration of speeches might be useful to someone out there in the teaching ether...