Interactive Replace English lessons for middle school.

Year 7 know the devices of persuasion, but their letters wander, so this lesson is about structure. The teacher gives each pair a Microsoft Whiteboard, shared through school accounts, holding twelve sticky notes cut from a letter to the local council asking for a skate park on the old tennis courts: an opening that states the case, three arguments with evidence, a counter-argument and its rebuttal, and a closing call to action. Pairs drag the notes into the order that makes the strongest letter, then add a label beside each paragraph naming its job. The teacher circulates and asks pairs to defend any choice that breaks the pattern, such as opening with the counter-argument. Students finish by copying the paragraph plan into their books as the frame for their own letter.

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

Year 8 know that a sonnet has fourteen lines, and this lesson shows them how one is built. Each pair opens its own FigJam board from the teacher's link, on school accounts. On it are the fourteen lines of Christina Rossetti's 'Remember' as grey sticky notes in a jumbled heap, with the first line, 'Remember me when I am gone away', locked in place at the top. Pairs first recolour each note by the sound its last word ends on, so that 'away', 'stay', 'day' and 'pray' all turn yellow, and find they need five colours. Told that the first eight lines rhyme ABBA ABBA, they use the colours to rebuild them, then argue over the last six, where the pattern stops helping and they have to follow the sense. The teacher circulates, asks pairs to read a doubtful join aloud, and then shows Rossetti's order on the board.

Pairs mark the line where the poem turns, 'Yet if you should forget me for a while', and each student writes in their book what the speaker asks for before that line and what she asks for after it.

Tools: FigJam Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are reading poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Each student opens their own copy of The Tyger in a Google Doc and highlights it using a four-colour key the teacher has put at the top: yellow for questions, green for repetition, orange for images of fire and burning, and blue for the forge and its tools, such as "hammer", "chain", "furnace" and "anvil". Beside each highlight they add a comment saying what the word or image suggests about the tiger's maker. The teacher reads annotations with individual students at their desks, then models how to turn three annotations into a paragraph on why the poem is built almost entirely from unanswered questions. Students finish by drafting their own paragraph under the poem.

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

Year 8 are studying how writers build and release tension. The teacher has written a short branching mystery in Twine, The Empty House, with nine decision points, and shared it as a single web page that students open on their own devices. At each branch, students write their choice and a one-line prediction in their books before clicking, and once the next passage loads they note whether the tension rose or fell and copy out the sentence that did the work. Halfway through, the teacher stops the room so three students who took different routes can compare what they read, and the class lists the techniques that turned up in the tensest passages: short sentences, withheld information, a noise from the floor above. Students finish by going back to read one branch they did not take, ready to plan a two-branch scene of their own next lesson.

Tools: Twine Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 9 are preparing to write analytically about Wilfred Owen's "Exposure". The teacher has built one FigJam board per pair, shared through school accounts, holding eighteen shuffled sticky notes: six quotations such as "the merciless iced east winds that knive us" and "But nothing happens", six technique labels and six effect statements. Pairs drag the notes into matched triples, then rank the six triples from most to least powerful, which forces an argument about which technique is doing the most work. The teacher circulates and asks a question of any pair whose triple does not hold together, rather than announcing answers to the room. The lesson ends with each pair copying its strongest triple into their books and turning it into one analytical sentence.

Tools: FigJam Nine ideas for your own version in Generate