T3: ENGLISH NEWSLETTER

This term has been fraught with nervous students heading towards terminal exams, as well as end of unit assessments, but we still had time to squeeze in some nice activities in English lessons!

Year 8 have been working their way through the play ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, and performed some excellent news reports of vile murders in the dark and murky streets of Victorian London, and have enjoyed their dip into gothic horror as a genre.

Year 9 have begun the IGCSE course for both Literature and Language, and have begun studies on the poetry anthology they’ll need for their exams in 2028: It feels like a long way off, but it will slip by in no time at all! Both year 9 and 10 have been working on their rhetoric and polishing their public speaking skills as we round off the year with some persuasive writing; I look forward to hearing their speeches next week.

Year 10 have had their feedback from their pre-mock exams, and for English they have handled them really well. Hopefully this will offer them insight into future improvements for the real thing next year.

And we said farewell to Year 11; Teaching life has been a lot more dull in the school without them! They all seemed very positive about their exam performances, so I hope we will see them return for Year 12 to undertake their English Literature A Levels.

ANd finally, the Year 12 students left behind their AS course and began their A Level course, starting with the pre-1900 poetry and familiarising themselves with the world of Romanticism as an artistic movement, and its first celebrity; Lord George Gordon Byron. Frilly shirts and tragic heroes aside, we are making good headway through his anthology.