My daughter loves English literature so we tend to do a LOT of it which is why I covered that in a separate post so this is going to be more about English Language resources (although there is some overlap).

For the past two years we have been using the Get It Right Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar workbooks and we are going to stick with the range and work through workbook 3 this year. My daughter has found the previous two workbooks a good combination of revising things she knows and then slightly extended her practice/implementation of everything. We also get the answer book and then once she has worked through her pages she checks her answers herself.

A fairly new one, towards the end of last year we discovered the Get It Right Vocabulary books, again there are three workbooks for KS3 but because we started them late we are still doing a bit of catch up (my daughter insisted that she wanted to work through the entire series because in her words – having a good vocabulary is vital for writing – and she loves writing). So she still needs to finish workbook 2 and then we will progress onto workbook 3. With this series all the answers are free to download for the site.

Then a new one. War Anthology. I know I have mentioned this book a lot lately but I feel like it crosses over many “subjects”. It is part English Literature, part English Language and it brings in war topics which are covered in History. Okay so why do I say part English Literature, part English Language? Well the War Anthology book takes extracts from well know pieces of war books / war poetry / and actually not-fiction war related items (including films) which the kids need to read and then do a series of activities on it. And the activities are wide ranging activities – from answering basic do you understand what you have read type questions, to lovely writing activities, to some language style questions. It really is just a wide, all encompassing English resource. And it is the style that we like because your English work is linked to a topic. (This is going to the second book in this English Anthology series that we are using and it is safe to say we are fans of this series).

We also tend to use Twinkl quite a lot for English. We have done a few of the English units in the past and we have often just found an individual lesson that covers what we want and done that. But however we do use it the KS3 English section is one that I visit on a regular basis. I love their comprehensions for KS3 (especially the non-fiction comprehensions – I like using a comprehension after we have covered a topic), I also really like some of their writing activities and we have used a lot of their English literature units already. We like that there is normally a Powerpoint which explains the concept / or activity so my daughter goes through that and then she does the activities linked to it. This means she is able to tackle them independently which she likes. So for this year I know we will be working through more of the KS3 Comprehensions, we are going to tackle the Whodunnit writing unit and the Fiction Writing unit, oh and we are going to use the SPaG Samurai units (Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation).

Oh and I must also state that I will probably dip in and use some of the GCSE Language resources on the site (we used a few of the GCSE English Literature units last year and my daughter really enjoyed them and managed really well so I am not restricting us to only KS3 pages)

Okay then lastly my daughter actually wants to start doing “tests”. She has requested it so we are going to start including them. I am still looking for what I am going to use for these English Language tests, but once I find something I will write about it.