For part of my daughter’s Year 9 Literature she choose to read Macbeth and as we are so close to her starting to work on her GCSE’s I decided we would have a go at using some of the GCSE Macbeth resources with her.

We have used a number of the English Literature units from Twinkl’s Beyond section before and we have enjoyed using them so I thought we would give their GCSE Macbeth Unit a try. The entire unit consists of 20 lessons, the lessons start with the first scene of the play and continue right the way through (some lessons only cover 1 scene others may cover 3 scenes in a lesson, it just depends how significant the scenes are). In each lesson you get a lesson plan, a Powerpoint presentation, some activities and extracts of key text. Now I must point out although they do include extracts of key sections of the text which you can print out it is not the entire text so you do need to have a copy of the play to read along as you work through the lessons.

We worked through every lesson (in order) and in every lesson we went through the Powerpoint presentation as we read the allocated section of the play. The Powerpoint presentation, walks the kids through the selected section, explains things like context or terms and then also guides them through the activities provided. I loved these Powerpoint docs, they were just what I needed to guide us through the play in a logical step by step manner.

I have to admit we did not print out or use the text extracts that are included because we just used our RSC Macbeth book but I do think some users may find these useful. We did love the idea of the Summary doc – where the kids had to write a sentence or two explaining what happened in each scene and we liked the activities included.

We probably did 95% of all the activities included and we thought they included a nice variety in the types of activities. It was not just straight forward boring worksheet but they had things like the scene ladders (loved this idea), true and false documents and converting text into modern language. The variety in terms of the type of activity that they included does help to keep the sessions interesting.

For some of the activities they do include answers but they are a few where no answers where included (the questions where there could be a wide range of answers). My daughter did say that just having a basic exemplar of what a suggested answer could look like, just a rough guide (even if it is a case of there being lots of possible answers) would have been nice.

We worked through the whole unit in roughly five weeks. And I do feel that by working through each lesson we have covered the main characters, how their characters developed, the key events and the themes that run through the play. I was happy with the scope of these lessons.

Both my daughter and I enjoyed working through this unit and we would recommend it for anyone reading Macbeth.