My daughter really enjoys English Literature. She loves the older, more classic stories, Jane Austen and Shakespeare are current favourites. She enjoys the way they are written, the fact that she sometimes has to figure out what they mean and she likes the historical settings. A few of the books that she finds fascinating are actually studied at GCSE level but because she is so interested in the books we have chosen to read some of them now and study the works but not at the same detail as they would later on. Our reason for doing this is 100% driven by her desire to read these books. She reads lots of other books in her own time but she was desperate that we include some of the classics this year as part of her academic work. (I must admit she actually already knows the basics of all these works as she has read condensed versions but she wanted to work through the “proper” versions with me).
We started with Romeo and Juliet over the summer. We read our stunning RSC Romeo and Juliet book (I really am a big fan of the way they have set this out) and then at her request we looked for some worksheets to complete along with the book. I knew Twinkl had Romeo and Juliet worksheets on their Secondary site so we started there and I must admit I was really impressed with how much they had, the detail and the different activities was impressive. I know they are always updating their site but when I downloaded the Romeo and Juliet section I found 28 different lessons and lots of other extra resources (it is under KS4 literature). If you just select the Unit of work on the left hand menu you will only get the lessons but there is a lot of really good extra pages so I suggest looking at everything. Each lesson varies slightly but at a minim there is always a PowerPoint doc which explains the text that the lesson covers and at least 1 printout (often more than 1). The printouts vary between all kinds of pages. Some are straight forward worksheets, some are character summaries or events summaries, really a lot of content.
For our purposes, I went through each lesson by myself and then my daughter and I would read the text in our book and depending on the lesson we sometimes read the PowerPoint together, sometimes did the worksheet and even sometimes just miss a lesson out and continued reading. We did not do even worksheet included, we picked the ones we thought interesting and the ones we thought highlighted key themes.
It is the first time we have used a whole literature unit from the Twinkl Secondary site and I was very impressed with it. I liked the way they set it out, and yes there are pages that we ignored but I much prefer picking which pages I want from a wide selection then feeling limited and frustrated because there is not enough. And I must admit we felt like they came up with some interesting pages.
I am so impressed that I have already gone and downloaded the next Shakespeare work that my daughter wants to cover later this year and I will definitely come back and look at the other literature works that they cover as part of both KS3 and KS4 English.
Admin – This is NOT a sponsored post. This is just me writing about something that we used and enjoyed using.
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