A Christmas Carol
The Complete Teacher Pack

A Christmas Carol taught as the argument it is, for whichever of the four boards marks it. Thirty-five one-hour lessons in seven units: a week on 1843 and what Dickens was arguing, then the novella stave by stave, then the exam board by board. Every lesson is one card. It holds a five-minute retrieval, the passage to read, the main activity in numbered steps with minutes, the writing, the check, an exam-focus line for each board, and what changes for a student who is stuck or ahead.

Four answers to every question, not three. Weak, developing, strong and exceptional, each written separately for every board that sets the novella, marked against that board’s own descriptors, with why it earns its band and what would move it up. The fourth band is the one teachers ask for and rarely get: what a top answer does that a merely secure one does not.

Seven knowledge organisers and seven printable diagnostics, one per unit. Retrieval is cumulative from lesson 6. Every starter says whether its questions come from last lesson, last week, last unit or long-term memory. Support, core and challenge in every unit, and what changes for SEND, EAL, stretch and disadvantaged students. A hundred-question knowledge test with answers, and the twenty things to remember if a student remembers nothing else.

Four boards, four different questions. AQA prints an extract and asks about the novel as a whole, 30 marks, no SPaG on this section. Edexcel splits it in two: 20 marks on the extract for method alone, then 20 on the novel elsewhere. Eduqas weights AO1, AO2 and AO3 equally across 40. OCR offers a choice of two, caps an extract-only answer at Level 3, and is the only board awarding SPaG here. A single “model answer” would be wrong for three of the four.

The novella is out of copyright, so seventeen pages of it are printed at the back, clean, for annotation. Those pages are the opening, the collectors, Belle, Ignorance and Want, the grave and the change, and a department needs to buy nothing to use them. Every quotation is machine-checked against Dickens’s text, every exam figure read from the boards' own papers, and every date traced to a named source. Where the book is commonly got wrong — the child who does not die, the spirit that never speaks, the warning that names Ignorance rather than Want — the pack says so, and says what it costs in the exam.

Written to

AQA 8702, Pearson Edexcel 1ET0, WJEC Eduqas and OCR J352, read from each board’s own papers and mark schemes; every quotation checked by machine against Dickens’s text

Intended for

English teachers and heads of English. A seven-week scheme taught to a class, not a student revision guide

Extent

139 pages · 70 sections