20 Revision Activities for the English Classroom

Revision that students enjoy and remember. This 42-page teacher guide has 20 games, graphic organisers and retrieval tasks for revising characters, themes, key moments, quotations and language techniques. Each one works with any text on your course.

Written by Clare Madden, secondary English teacher, author of the Touchstones Junior Cycle English series and creator of the My Brain and Me learning-to-learn course.

**What's inside**

Every activity has:

- **At a glance:** aim, best used for, groups, timing and learning outcomes

- **A clear diagram** or **real student exemplars** showing what the activity looks like

- **What you will need** and **step-by-step instructions**

- **Why is this effective revision?** The learning science, in a few lines.

- **Tips and variations,** including support ideas

- **Classroom examples on real texts,** junior and senior cycle, with answers for your teacher's key

- **A ready-to-use AI prompt:** copy it, swap in your own text and class, and generate the cards, quotes or organisers for your lesson in minutes. Each prompt comes with a reminder to check the output against your own copy of the text.

**The 20 activities**

*Quick retrieval:* Quote Relay · Disappearing Quotes · Quote Explosion

*Card games:* Dual-Coded Quote Flashcards · Quotes and Cards · Quote Dominoes · Pairs · Quote Taboo

*Dice and talk games:* Roll the Dice · Who Am I? · Just a Minute

*Plot, character and theme organisers:* Story Organiser · Text Map · Intersecting Plot Lines · Character Arc Graph · Double Spray Comparison · Comparative Jigsaw

*Poetry and language techniques:* Illustrated Quote Gallery · Sketchnoting Key Terms · Quote Pictionary

**Texts used in the examples include**

Junior Cycle: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Of Mice and Men, Noughts and Crosses, The Outsiders, Bog Child, Things Fall Apart, Blood Brothers, Twelve Angry Men, Stones in His Pockets, Sing Street, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, plus anthology poems such as 'Mid-Term Break' and 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

Leaving Certificate: Othello, Hamlet, Hamnet, Dracula, Girl on an Altar, The Great Gatsby, Small Things Like These, Sive, A Doll's House, Lessons in Chemistry, The Underground Railroad, Knives Out, The Banshees of Inisherin, and the poetry of Yeats, Dickinson, Donne, Meehan, Plath and Bishop.

The examples follow the prescribed lists for Junior Cycle (final assessment 2027, and 2028–30) and Leaving Certificate (2027 and 2028).

**Who it's for**

- English teachers preparing classes for Junior Cycle or Leaving Cert exams (the activities work with any text, at any level)

- Teachers looking for active, low-prep revision lessons

- English departments building a shared bank of revision strategies

**Format:** 42-page print-ready PDF (landscape A4), in full colour.