Passive Replace sits at the Passive row and Replace column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real English lessons for middle school (KS3, Years 7 to 9, ages 11 to 14) that sit in Passive Replace, plus anti-examples that look like it but sit elsewhere.
Persuasive writing: reading a model letter to the head about a longer lunch break
Year 7 are starting their persuasive writing unit and need a clear model before they write their own. The teacher has written a one-page letter to the headteacher arguing that lunch should be fifteen minutes longer, and shows it on PowerPoint one paragraph per slide while reading it aloud. After each paragraph students fill in a three-column table in their books: the device (rhetorical question, statistic, rule of three, direct address, counter-argument), the exact words, and what it is meant to make the head think or feel. The teacher lingers on the counter-argument paragraph, which opens "Some staff may worry that a longer lunch means a later finish", to show how a writer concedes a point and then answers it. Students end by choosing the sentence most likely to change the head's mind and writing two lines explaining why.
Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 6 watch the short film Alma to gather setting details for eerie story openings
Year 7 are about to write their own atmospheric story openings, and the teacher wants a strong model of setting before they start. The class watches Rodrigo Blaas's five-minute animated short Alma on the board, shown full screen from YouTube with comments hidden: a girl in a snowy, empty street is drawn into a toy shop by a doll that looks exactly like her. They watch once for the story, then a second time with the teacher pausing at three moments while students list details in their books under three headings: the street, the shop window and the inside of the shop. The teacher takes feedback on how the film builds unease through colour, silence and camera angles, and students turn their three best details into descriptive sentences in their books.
Analysing a poem: predict each stanza of Blake's 'A Poison Tree' as the slides reveal it
Year 8 are starting a poetry unit, and the teacher wants a first reading in which nobody can skip to the end. William Blake's 'A Poison Tree', from Songs of Experience (1794), is on four PowerPoint slides, one four-line stanza per slide. The teacher reads the first stanza aloud, stops on 'I told it not, my wrath did grow', and asks what the speaker might do with anger he has kept secret. Students write a prediction in their books, the next slide appears, and they note what Blake wrote instead: the wrath watered with tears, sunned with false smiles and grown into a tree bearing a bright apple. Before the last slide the class predicts what the foe will do now he has seen the apple shine.
With all four stanzas on a final slide, the teacher annotates the first two lines at the board as a model. Students copy two quotations into their books and write a paragraph on how the image of the tree shows what hidden anger becomes, and what the word 'glad' in the last two lines tells us about the speaker.
Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 7 recap of ethos, pathos and logos on a teacher-led slide deck
Year 8 are two lessons into a persuasive writing unit and start drafting their own speeches next lesson. The teacher opens with a five-slide PowerPoint on the board: one slide each for ethos, pathos and logos, then two slides that take one sentence about banning single-use plastic and rewrite it three times, once for each appeal. Students watch and listen, copying each definition and its example sentence into their books. For the rest of the lesson the teacher reads out six short extracts from speeches and adverts, students write in their books which appeal each one leans on, and they compare answers with a partner before the teacher goes through them.
Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 8 watch a context video on An Inspector Calls and build a vocabulary grid
Year 9 are halfway through An Inspector Calls and need the context vocabulary secure before next lesson's work on the Inspector's final speech. The teacher shows a vetted ten-minute context video from a GCSE English revision channel on the board, covering Priestley's socialism, the 1912 setting and the play being written in 1945. Students keep a grid in their books with three headings: social and political terms (capitalist, socialist, collective responsibility, philanthropy), Edwardian setting (suffragette, class hierarchy) and dramatic terms (dramatic irony, climax). As each word comes up the teacher pauses the video, and students write it down with a one-line definition in their own words and the character it links to. The lesson ends with students choosing three of the words and writing a sentence with each about Mr Birling or Sheila.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.