As of September by daughter will technically be moving into Year 7 (the start of Secondary school in the UK). Over the past 6 months she has naturally started working on longer projects and reading more complex books both of which we want to continue to encourage. But she also wants more structured activities to work through so we are trying to find a balance of giving her the slightly more structured approach she wants with still allowing for lots of flexibility and an emphasis on her creating and driving a number of her own learning projects. I am determined that we continue with this independent learning streak that she has as I strongly believe that building on that and encouraging her to do her own research and create her own projects is something that will serve her well in life.

So I am starting to put together some resource ideas for her Year 7. Now I am now doing detailed structured planning where I set out pages for each day – that does NOT work for us. But we are creating broader goals for the year – (when I say we I mean my daughter, my hubbie and myself are combining our thoughts on this). And I am as always pencil planning – making broad plans that we can and do change as need be.

Having said all of that I know lots of readers like to get ideas of possible resources so over August I am going to write a couple of posts setting out what we are planning on using with her for Year 7. (Bearing in mind some plans and resources may change as we progress through the academic year)

Today I am starting with English Literature. I am lucky in that both my kids love reading and introducing new books or getting them to read has never been an issue. For Literature we are coming up with a loose list of books we want to cover together but we are not making this list too long as we want to leave room for new discoveries.

We have always done family-read-togethers and our plan is it continue that with our set Literature books (for us this also means my eight -year old joins in). We are starting with Black Beauty. The idea is we will read it together like we have always done in the past – the 3 of us on the couch reading, chatting about events and characters, breaking to look something up – that is not going to change because it has worked really well for us. But scattered in-between those reading sessions we are also going to add some writing activities based on the book. I had spotted a potential set on the Twinkl Secondary site but they have since removed the pages so I am will probably make some pages for her myself – probably focusing on her writing character and event summaries.

Another book she has requested is Anne of Green Gables – she actually knows the story and has read a condensed version but was keen for us to tackle a more detailed version together. Both of our books are part of the Oxford Children’s Classic range which we have already used before and we really like this series of classic stories.  Depending on how we go with our other books we may add another one from this range (my daughter really enjoys these classics and I know she has Little Women included on her own private list of books to read).

Then Shakespeare. We have already read a bit about Shakespeare and my daughter has read a few condensed modern versions of his plays and actually enjoyed them (we even did a few activities around Romeo and Juliet). So we have decided that this year we are going to read one of his comedies together – we are thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or possibly Much Ado About Nothing. But we thought a more light hearted Shakespeare work would be a good one for us to start with (although the history part of her is also very keen to do Henry V – who knows we might possibly fit in two of his works?). And again I found some extra pages / printouts that we can use from the Twinkl Secondary site (A Midsummer Night’s Dream Twinkl Resources).

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