Key Stage Three – Anthony Cockerill

Refresh your planning and teaching in the English classroom with this helpful tool

An intuitive sequence of learning can simplify your planning, provide your department with a common language to talk about teaching and learning and help ensure progression for your students. Software engineers at Apple – so the story goes – had spent months working on elaborate interfaces for an app that allowed users to burn video…
Why a thematic curriculum is brilliant for Key Stage 3 English (and why it’s also great for your GCSE students too)

A thematic curriculum allows us to learn about those important touchstones of literary study alongside cultural totems of our time. Why a thematic curriculum? Spoiler alert. In the excellent film Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve), Amy Adams plays Louise Banks, an interpreter who is called upon to make sense of the multimodal scrawlings of intergalactic visitors…
How to use urban legends to teach students to write compelling narratives

What can we take from urban legends and their cinematic equivalents when teaching those elements of great stories and narratives? As a university student in the late 1990s, I was fascinated by what was, in hindsight, an early example of viral marketing, for the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. The film’s use of found…