Interactive Amplify English lessons for middle school.

Year 7 have met eight persuasive devices and now need to recognise them in texts not written for the classroom. The teacher builds a Wayground quiz from fifteen short extracts taken from charity leaflets and adverts, each asking which device is doing the work: direct address, emotive language, statistic, expert opinion, rhetorical question, rule of three, imperative or anecdote. Students play in the student-paced mode with answers shown after each question, so each sees straight away whether an answer was right along with the teacher's one-line explanation, and Redemption Questions at the end give them another go at questions they missed. After ten minutes the teacher checks the per-question report, sees that most of the class is confusing anecdote with emotive language, and stops the room for a five-minute contrast using two of the extracts. Students then finish the quiz and write their own example of each of the two confused devices in their books.

Tools: Wayground (formerly Quizizz) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 7 are meeting Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman for the first time. The teacher records a reading of the poem over the text on screen, uploads the video to Edpuzzle and adds seven questions at the moments that matter: after the opening image of the road as "a ribbon of moonlight", at each return of the refrain, and at the moment Bess fires the musket. The recording pauses at each question, skipping ahead is switched off, and students can rewind to hear a stanza again before they answer. Students work alone with headphones at their own pace, so the strongest readers reach two extension questions on the galloping metre at the end, while the teacher follows the answers as they come in and sits beside the students whose answers show they need another listen. The plenary settles the two questions most of the class got wrong, taken from the answers on the teacher's screen.

Tools: Edpuzzle Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have read Tennyson's six-line poem 'The Eagle' and can name its techniques, but their comments on effect all sound alike. The teacher opens one Microsoft Whiteboard board for the whole class on school accounts, with the poem in large type in the middle, and pairs join it on their devices. Each pair adds a sticky note beside one of four words, 'crooked', 'wrinkled', 'crawls' or 'thunderbolt', saying what the word makes them picture. Within five minutes fifteen notes are on the board for everyone to read. The teacher takes the notes on the line 'The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls' and drags them into clusters as the class watches: the sea is slow, the sea is tiny and far below, the sea is old, the sea is a living creature. The class decides which readings fit together and which two pull against each other, and each pair adds a second note under a reading it disagrees with, giving a reason from the poem.

Students then write a 'what, how, why' paragraph in their books on 'crawls' that uses one reading from the board that was not their own.

Tools: Microsoft Whiteboard Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher sets up three shared Google Docs, one each for Greta Thunberg's 2019 UN climate speech, Malala Yousafzai's 2013 UN speech and John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address, and gives a third of the class access to each. Every student highlights three lines and adds a comment naming the device (tricolon, anaphora, antimetabole, direct address, contrast) with a one-line note on its effect on the listener. Where a line already has a comment, students reply to it instead, agreeing or offering a different reading. In the plenary the teacher projects each Doc with its comments down the margin and stops on lines such as Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you", where students named different devices, for the class to settle.

Tools: Google Docs Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher gives each student one of three openings, split evenly across the class: H. G. Wells's The Red Room, which starts mid-conversation, W. W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw, which opens slowly on a cold, wet night in a firelit parlour, and the fireside frame narrative that opens Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw. Each student identifies two structural choices the writer made and the effect of each on the reader, and posts them as notes in the Padlet column for their opening. Students then read two posts in another column and add a comment where they would label the choice differently. The teacher projects the wall and leads a comparison of how each opening shapes what the reader expects to happen next.

Tools: Padlet Nine ideas for your own version in Generate