The English Department

All texts we use are in accordance with the documents listed above.  Related schemes are produced as a team and collated in the shared area (Z:\English\Schemes of Work and resources).  An example of the kind of text studied in each Year group might include:

 

Year 7 Kite Rider/The Merrybegot

Year 8 The Machine Gunners/The Boy in Striped Pyjamas/Goodnight Mister Tom/Starseeker

Year 9 Blackout/Stone Cold/Freedom Writers

 

Other texts this year will include: Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to prepare Years 7 and 8 for our planned trip to Dickens' London in 2014.

 

In terms of Drama, this year we have introduced an introduction to the history of drama for Year 7, including extracts from Greek drama and Shakespeare before moving on to the play version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Year 8 will study extracts from Romeo and Juliet in tandem with the thematically twinned Across the Barricades. Alternately, the Christmas themed It's a Wonderful Life can be paired with Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale and W.W. Jacobs' Monkey's Paw. Years 7 and 8 will have many opportunities for dramatic performance and creation while experiencing drama in a multi-textured, multi-media way.  Year 9 will study a full Shakespeare text in preparation for a SAT style assessment in the Spring term.  While this may seem rather harsh, we believe that a thoroughly enjoyable, interactive and focused approach to The Bard will be of great benefit in terms of lifting the levels of expectation for analysis of the writer’s craft while “demystifying” Shakespeare in readiness for GCSE.

 

Poetry needs special thought.  It is the intention of the English Department to create a departmental anthology of deliberately and carefully agreed upon texts to allow for an enjoyable and comprehensive journey through poetry during Key Stage 3 so that by the commencement of Year 10, our students will be well-versed in a rich canon of poetic works and comfortably familiar with a range of stylistic devices and structures while feeling that poetry is not a code to be unscrambled as many of them do at present but a valuable insight in to the history of humanity.

 

The Non-Fiction units will enable a full examination of our students’ abilities as readers, widening their experience and understanding of the writer’s craft.  At present, the Nelson Thornes Framework Non-Fiction range is being considered as a key textbook for this unit, especially given the detailed relationship that all of the activities have with the assessment foci and key skills recognised in the Framework for Teaching English which the department believes to be the most comprehensive and thorough checklist for student performance.