Quick Lit Revision – A Novel Revision Tool

As we approach exam frenzy time, a little group calm is always appreciated. At the moment Year 11 are going through the usual personal wobbles and convincing themselves they’ve forgotten everything! They haven’t of course, they’re just worrying, as they do.
This is a straightforward way of doing 2 things: creating an evidence-based revision resource for the whole class and most importantly, reinforcing their confidence…they do know!
A short starter activity that I used was to ask them to list 5-6 key themes and link each theme to at least 2 examples from the novel as a whole. When they had done this (confidence slowly returning!) I asked them to find key quotes to represent their examples. After they had shared with the class we had a range of examples to build on.
I then divided the novel up in to sections for each group of 4, aiming to allocate each section to two groups (thus giving an element of repetition but ensuring we had covered everything). Each group was asked to find 3 examples which demonstrated each key theme and a suitable quote for each. I usually allocate 30 minutes for this.
At the end of the lesson we had built a key themes quote bank for the entire novel and with some enthusiastic volunteers to type it up, bingo! A class revision resource made by their own hand. So much more engaging than giving them a booklet of crib notes!