All UK exam boards have an unseen poetry element to their GCSE English literature exams - a topic that is notoriously hard to revise for. After successfully building and releasing our English literature course for the start of this academic year, we received a number of requests asking for help with the dreaded ‘unseen poetry’.

While there won’t be any formal exams at the end of this year, poetry still makes up a significant chunk of all English literature courses and is bound to have a place in teachers’ assessments. 

For students in the lower years of KS4, learning and revising the building blocks of poetic techniques will prove invaluable when ‘unseen poetry’ papers return in 2022. As a result of teacher feedback, we decided to make a course that will help students to be as prepared as possible when faced with poems they have never seen before.

Build a framework

This new content tests students on and reinforces their knowledge of a range of poetic and literary techniques, giving them a framework for analysis. The course covers:

• Definitions of key terms

• Rhyme schemes, metres and their meanings 

• Identifying different poetic techniques in quotes

• Understanding what quotes are trying to say

• Poetic form

• Narrative voice

• Common poetic connotations 

• A wide range of poetic and literary devices

• The punctuation used in poems and its importance

When a student is equipped with the correct terminology and the skills to identify a variety of techniques, then they are much more able and confident when they have to put these skills into practice. 

Image-based questions

This new course is also our first English topic to use images, following on from the success of our maths images last term. To read more about how the introduction of images changed the possibilities available in our maths content click here.

The images we have created allow students to analyse lines of poetry without making our questions overly long or complicated. By using images, the students get experience looking at and interacting with sections of poetry they may not have seen before, which will help prepare them for any unseen poetry assessments as well as classroom analysis.

We hope that you and your students find this new course helpful as students approach the summer term. The Tassomai team is always open to feedback as we are constantly working to improve our product, so please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or comments about the course. 

We are constantly striving to expand and improve all of our courses which is why we have just introduced brand new video content for English literature. To find out more about it click here.