My son is moving up to Year 7 in his home education and when it comes to planning for his English I am going to be taking quite a few of the resources that worked well with my daughter and reusing them but I am also modifying it a bit so it suits him more, trying to link it in to topics that he enjoys.

So basics. We are sticking with the Get It Rights series – it just works well and I like the way they develop the English activities over the 3 years. So he will be using the Get It Right Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling book 1 and the Get It Right Vocabulary book 1. Now those are going to be covering our basics. With the Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation workbook I have bought the answer book that goes with it and for the Boost your Vocabulary book the answers are free to download from the Oxford University Press site.

Then we are going to bring in areas that he finds interesting – and that is one of the reasons that I really enjoy the KS3 English section on the Twinkl site. It is massive and they have included a huge range of resources. I think over the last 3 years of covering KS3 work with my oldest this English section was honestly one of my MUST-HAVE resources.

I know that for comprehensions there are going to be a whole bunch that will appeal to him (I already have marked these ones – The History of Lego, Living on Ice, Nelson Mandala, Giant Spider and Sinister Rats, Coral Reef Ecosystems, Seagrass Meadows and Extraordinary Events). I really love this section because they have just include such a wide range of topics that you can always find something interesting. And I really want to start working on how he answers his questions so comprehensions are going to be a big part of that.

We are also going to work through some of the English Units that they have on Twinkl. I have used a lot of those English units with my daughter over the last 3 years and I have to admit I found them so easy to use – everything that you need is already there so you don’t need to do a lot of prep work before hand and they have made them interesting. We are going to work through the Narrative Writing Unit, History of English and the Poetry around the world unit. I did both the Narrative Writing Unit and the History of English unit with my daughter and she found the History of English unit fascinating (they are both learning Latin so I think he will like that link) and the Narrative Writing unit is full of useful ideas. I have never done the Poetry around the world unit before but I have done two other poetry units from the site and for someone who is not a poetry fan I found them brilliant.

I also know that I want to work on his writing skills so we are going to dip into the writing section quite a lot over this coming year, but I am going to link the writing into the topics and themes that he enjoys. The way I use this site is once I have selected a page for us to use I always go to the right hand side and see what the other suggestions are linked to the page – by doing this I often end up finding extra gems that I may have missed otherwise.

Okay so we are going to be using a lot of the Twinkl KS3 pages with him. One last thing some of you may find the Twinkl KS3 English Curriculum map useful – I have never stuck to it but it does give good ideas and often even if you don’t follow the suggestion they give, it just might spark another idea for you. (The photo below is the copy that I printed out – I enlarged it and printed it over multiple pages which is why you can see pages stuck together – but you can just print it out onto 1 sheet of paper).

Then two other books that I started using with my daughter and used a little bit with my son are the English Anthology Mythology book and Detective books. I love this series. Really we are massive fans of how these books have been set up – the fact that they include fiction, non-fiction and poetry all linked together by a theme. Brilliant. And the activities, are so varied and interesting, really massive fans of these already so we are going to continue with both of these this coming year. Plus I know that for a kid, like my son, who finds Mythology fascinating, being able to work through English activities all around Mythology is just the going to be winner.

And lastly reading books. We read a lot and I mean a lot so I am going to talk about the books that we are planning on reading in a separate Year 7 English book post.