Weekend Academy – Full Curriculum Breakdown – Mr Burkes Classroom

Weekend Academy – Full Curriculum Breakdown

GCSE English Language & Literature (AQA-Focused, supports all major exam boards)
Led by Mr. Burke – AQA Examiner with over 12 years’ experience.

✏️ GCSE English Language

Sessions alternate between Paper 1 and Paper 2 skills on a structured weekly cycle.

Paper 1: Explorations in Creative Reading and Writing

Focus: Fiction texts and descriptive/narrative writing
Students will learn how to:
Analyse fiction extracts (20th and 21st century)
Understand how writers use language and structure to create effects
Identify and comment on key methods (similes, metaphors, dialogue, etc.)
Respond to the 4 key reading questions (Q1–Q4)
Write their own narrative or descriptive pieces with imagination, structure, and control (Q5)

✅ Skills covered:

Character and setting analysis
Creating tone and atmosphere
Openings, climaxes, flashbacks
Vocabulary precision and sentence variety
Use of punctuation for effect
Paragraphing and story arcs

Paper 2: Writers' Viewpoints and Perspectives

Focus: Non-fiction and persuasive/transactional writing

Students will learn how to:

Compare 19th and modern non-fiction texts
Identify writer’s attitudes, viewpoints, and methods
Analyse tone, formality, and rhetorical devices
Plan and write transactional pieces (e.g. letters, speeches, articles, reviews)

✅ Skills covered:

Summarising differences/similarities
Analysing persuasive language
Evaluating a writer’s success
Structuring opinion pieces clearly
Adjusting tone and register for audience/purpose
Using rhetorical questions, statistics, personal voice

📚 GCSE English Literature

We rotate texts each term. Sessions focus on close reading, quote recall, analytical writing, and exam preparation.

🔹 Shakespeare

Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet

✅ Focus areas:

Tragic structure and hero archetypes
Themes (ambition, violence, love, power, fate, loyalty)
Analysis of key scenes and soliloquies
Understanding context (Jacobean England, Divine Right, patriarchy)
Character development and interpretation
Practice exam questions with model answers and essay structures

🔹 19th Century Texts

A Christmas Carol
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Frankenstein

✅ Focus areas:

Victorian values and morality
Gothic and supernatural elements
Social justice and inequality
Themes: duality, isolation, redemption, responsibility
Contextual links to science, religion, and industrialisation
Character development and moral purpose
High-level analysis using PEE/PEAZ structure

🔹 Modern Texts (on request or where applicable for Edexcel/OCR)

An Inspector Calls
Of Mice and Men
Blood Brothers

✅ Focus areas:

Social class, responsibility, and generational divide
Writer’s message and political context
Stagecraft and dramatic tension
Key character arcs and thematic quotes

🔹 Poetry Clusters

✅ AQA Power & Conflict

Weekly analysis of one poem (including unseen pairings)
Comparing themes (e.g. war, memory, identity, nature, power)
Poet context and language technique analysis
Planning and writing comparative essays
Practice comparing poems (e.g. Bayonet Charge vs Remains)

✅ Love and Relationships Cluster (available upon request)

Exploring romantic and family love
Form, structure, tone and voice
Thematic comparisons and personal interpretations

Welcome to Mr. Burke’s Classroom, led by Ofsted-rated teacher Marcus Burke with 10+ years’ experience. Specializing in English and Sociology, he offers the Home School Academy, Weekend Academy, and 1-to-1 Tuition.

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