Teaching The Great Gatsby

Teachers’ worksheets to tackle Fitzgerald

This week hard pressed A Level Eng. Lit. teachers can breathe a sigh of relief that there are some more helpful resources to take the hassle out of lesson planning. Entirely free and written by UK A Level classroom practitioners, the latest set of downloadable The Great Gatsby worksheets from Crossref-it.info cover topics such as:

• How society operated in the Jazz Age, as depicted in the novel
• The use of colours and symbols in The Great Gatsby
• The effect of the narrative framework
• The impact of the opening and ending of the novel.

Each sheet can be printed off and used for homework tasks or to help students catch up missed work, and there is also a series of directed questions investigating each chapter of the text.

To help students speedily access helpful information, the downloads also suggest where they can find relevant material in the Great Gatsby text guide (launched last September) to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. In it you’ll discover not just chapter-by-chapter synopses and commentaries, but sections about the social, political and philosophical background to the Jazz Age, as well as the characters and structure of the novel, and recent critical approaches to the text.

If you think you’ve got more teaching ideas about The Great Gatsby you’d like to contribute, please submit them to info@crossref-it.info and they may feature in a future blog!

New Wuthering Heights revision plan

How well do you know your text?

Three weeks ago Crossref-it.info launched a new student guide to help those studying Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for A Level. Now there is a handy revision plan to help you make sure you are really up to speed when it comes to answering on the novel.

The plan covers all sorts of areas:

> Easy multiple choice questions so that you can be confident you’re familiar with the novel

The revision plan tells you how you’ve done and gives you the chance to try again if you get something wrong, pointing you in the right direction to find the correct answer.

> Directed note-making on important aspects of each chapter

It’s like having your own personal teacher, shining a light onto the key points you need to think about.

> Useful essay questions on character, narrative and theme, with examples of how you might answer

From this point of the academic year onwards, you need to gather together all the strands of what you’ve learnt and weave them into coherent arguments. The plan shows you how (and for more advice about essay and exam writing, check out the ‘How to write a good exam answer’ section at Crossref-it.info). 

Access the Wuthering Heights study plan

If you haven’t already done so, you need first to install the Crossref-it.info English Literature app from the Chrome Webstore using the Google Chrome browser. Once you’ve signed in, for just 79p you can get guided revision help on Wuthering Heights. 

The better you do at each level of the revision app, the more bronze, silver and golden quills you can gains to add to your account.