- Are you studying or teaching Shakespeare's Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet or King Lear?
Is Jane Austen's Persuasion or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on your exam texts list? - Is Poetry and Prose Commentary an important part of your literature studies course?
Five of the study guides have been fully and independently reviewed by the US College Board. If you would like to read the reviews, click here to reach the AP Central website. Go to the green button AP COURSES AND EXAMS, then to Teachers' Resources, and put Wordsmith in the Search box.
The Wordsmith Prompts
We have selected a variety of literature texts commonly studied in Grades 10 upwards, and produced for them a series of study tasks based in the main on actual classroom work as well as on past IB and AP assessments.
The Prompts are not book-length study commentaries like The WordSmith Guides. Rather, they are outline resources, consisting of a range of questions and assignments designed to take students into the heart of each chapter of a novel (or each scene of a play, or each poem in a collection) as they have finished reading it. Together they help build up an overview of each of the five SCASI aspects of the whole piece of writing (Setting, Character, Action, Style and Ideas - the fundamental structure of The WordSmith Guides themselves).
Prompts are available for works by the following authors (and we are steadily adding more authors and texts to the list):
Chinua Achebe
Maya Angelou
Margaret Atwood
Jane Austen
Mariama Bâ
Samuel Beckett
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
Truman Capote
Peter Carey
Geoffrey Chaucer
Kate Chopin
J. M. Coetzee
Joseph Conrad
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Laura Esquivel
William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E. M. Forster
Robert Frost
Athol Fugard
William Golding
Nadine Gordimer
Graham Greene
Sara Gruen
David Guterson
Lorraine Hansberry
Thomas Hardy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ernest Hemingway
Khaled Hosseini
Henrik Ibsen
Kazuo Ishiguro
Henry James
Ruth Prawar Jhabvala
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
John Knowles
Harper Lee
Doris Lessing
David Malouf
Dalene Matthee
Cormac McCarthy
Frank McCourt
Arthur Miller
Toni Morrison
Naguib Mahfouz
Tim O'Brien
Michael Ondaatje
George Orwell
Wilfred Owen
Sylvia Plath
Jean Rhys
William Shakespeare
Mary Shelley
John Steinbeck
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Paul Theroux
Mark Twain
Richard Wright
Markus Zusak
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Books Monthly, May 2011
“All three of the Paka Mdogo stories are charming. The moral lessons are present, but subtly presented and deftly handled...Author Toshack is working on additional books for this series and new adventures for Paka Mdogo. An increasingly long line of children can hardly wait.”
January Magazine September 2011
“This series of books is creative, clever, and fact-filled.”
Eileen Granfors, Amazon ‘Vine Voice’ Reviewer, December 2011
“I can't believe the amount of work which has gone into this! Absolutely fantastic for the IB PYP programme. Great chapter-by-chapter and whole-book activities, linked to UK curriculum as well as PYP.”
