English Literature GCSE War Poetry Unit

English Literature GCSE War Poetry Unit

Teacher’s Notes

Unit 1:

War: Introduction

This is an interactive presentation using Opus Presenter that stimulates the pupils’ initial responses to the concept of war. The activities lead on to a creative writing piece that could contribute to the English GCSE coursework folder. It became necessary to show the pupils the opening of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ in order for them to understand what D-Day means. ‘The Longest Day’ might also be appropriate for this.

Unit 2:

Using CATS

This PowerPoint presentation explains the suggested framework for responding to poetry. The acronym CATS stands for: Content, Attitude (or Atmosphere if more appropriate), Techniques and Success.

This framework allows the pupils to show that they understand the content whilst avoiding spending too much time and effort on ‘re-telling the story’.

Unit 3:

Dulce et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen

This presentation takes the pupils through the poem in some detail and as such this would make it a useful starting point for the unit. There are references to prepared Word documents that sadly cannot be included due to copyright constraints. These documents are, on the whole relatively straightforward to prepare, especially the sequenced sections, especially if you have downloaded the excellent Word add-in ‘Teacher’s Pet’ ( http://www.teachers-pet.org/ ). A working knowledge of ‘templates’ and ‘forms’ would be needed to create the version of the poem with drop-down menus.

Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive (WOMDA)

This presentation encourages the pupils to use the (outstanding) web resource (http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/ ) to prepare a presentation to the rest of the class. This site is a vast collection of contemporary and recent images, texts, sound and video clips that can be easily assimilated into a multimedia presentation, providing a valuable sense of historical context for the unit.

Unit 4:

Anthem for Doomed Youth – Wilfred Owen

Dead Boche – Robert Graves

As the Team’s Head Brass – Edward Thomas

Naming of Parts – Henry Read

The Soldier – Rupert Brooke

Each of these presentations takes the pupils through the poems using ‘CATS’ as their structure. Each one is intended to be lead by the teacher during the course of a one hour lesson.

Unit 5:

Preparing Coursework Task

This presentation is intended for use following the study of some or all of the above poems. It takes the pupils through the process of drafting a response to two of the poems.