Twelve weeks · Paper 1 Section A

Scheme of work

Built on one principle: the question types are taught through the texts, not after them. Each anthology text carries the skill it teaches best, and unseen practice arrives once the method is second nature.

Wk	Text / focus	Teaching focus	Written outcome
1	The Danger of a Single Story	How to read non-fiction: SLAP (structure, language, audience, purpose); speech architecture (introduction, exposition, peroration); ethos, logos, pathos. Sectioning and annotation tasks.	Annotated speech; first PEEWE paragraphs on identity.
2	A Passage to Africa	Reportage and the ethics of witness: the enigma opening, the turn, direct address. Twenty annotation questions; desensitisation debate.	Analytical paragraphs; Q3-style thoughts-and-feelings practice.
3	The Explorer’s Daughter	Divided loyalty in travel writing: lyrical description against factual justification; tracing a conflict of feeling through a text.	Conflict-map of the text; language-for-effect table.
4	Explorers or boys messing about?	News values and slant: how a report that looks balanced steers its reader. Fact and opinion work. Questions 1 to 3 drilled on this text.	Timed Q1–Q3; slant-spotting homework.
5	Between a Rock and a Hard Place	Tension in autobiography: present tense, short sentences, technical register. The 12-mark method introduced: three ideas, topic sentences, embedding.	First timed 12-mark answer (tense atmosphere).
6	Young and dyslexic?	Argument from lived experience: anecdote as evidence, direct address, the rallying close. Structure of a column argued through memoir.	12-mark answer redraft from marking-desk notes.
7	A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat	Comic travel writing: pace, hinge paragraphs, bathos. Onomatopoeia and sentence rhythm for chaos.	PETAL paragraphs; engage-the-reader 12-mark practice.
8	Beyond the Sky and the Earth	Wonder and the observer role: cataloguing, second person, the limits of vocabulary. Travel writing debate: does it mislead?	12-mark answer (sense of wonder).
9	H is for Hawk	Memoir and restraint: tense slips, minor sentences, allusion. Reading grief in a text without dramatising it in the classroom.	Structure-focused analysis paragraph; themes table.
10	Chinese Cinderella	Autobiography and archetype: dread, reversal, the bargain ending. The 22-mark comparison method introduced with the Running Away exemplar.	First timed 22-mark comparison.
11	Unseen practice I–II	L5 unseen weeks: historical fiction then memoir. GAP orientation, locate by lines, points match marks, inference with evidence. Self- and peer-marking against point menus.	Two full unseen question sets, self-marked.
12	Unseen practice III + mock	Biography unseen; full-paper timing; the five-question rhythm end to end. Redrafting from marking-desk annotations.	Full timed Section A mock.

Slides for all ten texts and the three unseen weeks exist in the department archive; the PEEWE/PETAL scaffolds and line-by-line question sequences in them map directly onto the text pages of this site.