Progression in writing to describe

In Stella Gibbons’ 1932 comic masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm, the author obligingly stars the most purple of descriptive passages with one, two or three stars to allow readers to skip or admire her descriptions. The first of her starred passages is a description of the eponymous farm and begins:
“Dawn crept over the Downs like a [...]

Great Expectations Assignment

This is a quick posting for Mike and all the others who have requested more details of the Great Expectations GCSE assignment that I alluded to in my posting entitled, “Little bits of learning”. If you haven’t read it, then this is going to make very little sense – actually – come to think of [...]

Sentence Investigations

It is a strange coincidence that, just as DNA has only four bases and yet accounts for the vast diversity of humanity, prose is made up of only four types of sentence and covers everything from a child’s first scribblings to Solzhenitsyn.
Teaching students about the four types of sentence is good practice in English teaching [...]

Form Audience and Purpose

I made this resource for revising with my students in preparation for their GCSE English Paper 1. I wanted to highlight the connections between potential texts on Section A and their purposes.
Having used it now with two classes I can say that it works well and serves as a useful ‘at a glance’ revision sheet. [...]

Test frames for word classes

If you are teaching grammar with your students, you will probably want to examine the common word classes at some point.
One word of advice, avoid trying to define these classes by their roles. It is still commonplace for many of my students to say, “Oh a verb, that’s a doing word.” Hmm. One immediate problem [...]

It’s not just food…

So begins the rather irritating tag-line of a series of TV advertisements for a well-known supermarket’s line in groceries (whose initials might be M and S). In case you haven’t seen them, the advertisements are an object lesson in noun modification. Yes, yes, I know, I should get out more…
In grammatical terms this is a [...]

Odd one out starter

It’s an old game: give students a bank of three or four things and ask them to find the ‘odd one out’. What is not quite so old is the idea of adapting this game for developing thinking skills in relation to literature.
Today my Year 11 lesson began this way. I showed the students four [...]

Preparing to describe

Its that time of year again when all I seem to be doing in my classes is preparing students for examinations. Well, that is a slight exaggeration but I am sure that you know what I mean.
One of the skills required by examinations in English students is the ability write to describe. As I’ve mentioned [...]

Revising Poems and Prose

Here is a handy pair of revision sheets (one for poetry, one for prose). I normally print them on A3 paper and students use the prompts to annotate the sheet with salient details for each text.
The large grey words indicate a link to exam questions. For example, an exam question that asks “how a writer [...]

Revise with ‘Taboo’

Ever played Taboo? It’s a board game made by Hasbro I think. The idea is that, against the clock, you have to get team-mates to guess a word on a card. yet on that same card are related words that are “taboo” and can’t be used in your explanation. For example, how do you get [...]