Jekyll and Hyde Coursework help

The most important thing to remember is that all of the website I am listing are for guidance only. Plagiarism (passing off the work of others as your own) is a serious offence, and will result in all your coursework being refused.

Don't let that put you off using these sites, however. They have chapter summaries, explain the main themes and provide quotations.

The actual text
This site lets you search it, so if you can remember the odd word in a quote, you should be able to pinpoint it with the search function. Annoyingly, the chapters don't have their titles.
Online Literature
Chapter 1- Story of the Door
Chapter 2- Search for Mr Hyde
Chapter 3- Dr Jekyll was quite at ease
Chapter 4- The Carew Murder Case
Chapter 5- The incident of the letter
Chapter 6- The remarkable incident of Dr Lanyon
Chapter 7- The incident at the window
Chapter 8- The last Night
Chapter 9- Dr Lanyon's narrative
Chapter 10- Henry Jekyll's full statement of the case

If you want a chapter summary, try a site like Spark notes. This also has commentary and important quotations explained. Remember that your focus is on Duality in the novel, not retelling the story. Some of these American sites are not aimed at the academic level of A and A* GCSEs.
Cliff Notes is another American site with commentary and chapter summaries whch you may find useful.

Here is a mini-essay on the duality in the book, you might one to use it as a starting point to develop your own ideas.

Here are a few quotes from the book, and some more.



To really stretch your brain, here are some links to scholarly essays on Jekyll and Hyde. These are the sort you would read if you were studying English at University, so don't panic if you don't understand any of them. The first is on on The Psychology of Disassociation , in Jekyll and Hyde, where the author interprets the book using psychological terms. Another essay is by Anne styles and focuses on The Double Brain in Jekyll and Hyde.Both will give you a lot to think about!

A Common Language?

English- a truly international language, understood by millions across the world, and now by your mobile phone. Google recently launched a voice recognition application for the Apple iPhone which allows users to access the huge might of the its search engine by speaking into their phones.

A fantastic development, you might think, except for the fact that it doesn't recognize British accents. An article in the Daily Telegraph explores this problem. They asked people with a variety of regional accents to say the word "iphone"and the voice recognition returned a variety of results, none however, were to do with the iphone!

A user with a Scottish accent found his phone opted to search for the term "sex" instead, and suggested a link to an adult web site. On a second attempt, the search engine looked for "sledding".Asked in a Kentish accent to search for "iPhone", it came up with "my sister" and "Einstein", while a Surrey user was offered "myspace" as well as "Einstein".A Yorkshireman was offered "bonfire" before managing to get "iPhone" - the only time the voice-recognition worked.The most unusual responses were to a Welsh accent, when the device interpreted "iPhone" as "gorillas" and "kitchen sink".

You can watch the video here

New Games

If you look on the top right hand corner of this blog, you will see a two new games.

The first one is designed to build your vocabulary. You have to match the words which are similar. The words change daily, and playing this game will improve your vocabulary.

Below it is the Hangman game. Try to guess the word by typing letters in the box. Each letter which is in the Garbage Pile adds another section of the hanged man and his gallows. This will help with vocabulary, reading and spelling.

Jekyll and Hyde

Recently, I've been noticing how often the phrase Jekyll and Hyde is used by newspapers to describe someone or something that can appear both good and evil.

This is from the Sun newspaper, about the Shannon Matthew's case which has gone to trial. Karen Matthews was accused of being sad one minute and cheerful the next.

It is used in another murder trial where a man is accused of killing his whole family. This article comes from the Telegraph





But it's not just murderers who can be described in this way. Football teams also earn this moniker.
Worcester City's manager is unhappy with the inconsistent and wildly differing nature of his team's performance:Finally,in a nod to pathetic fallacy, the city of Norwich is described as a Jekyll and Hyde place. A taxi driver was assaulted, he claims that the character of his town changes after nine at night.

Twilight Film

The Twilight film is released in the UK on the 19th of December, 2008- a great activity for the last day of term, perhaps?
This is the US trailer- they've changed a few things, but it seems quite true to the book.

Young Minds 2008 Shortlist Competition

Books have a certain magic about them. We can look to them to help us understand the world, our friends and our own feelings. The Young Minds charity aims to improve the mental health and well being of children and young people. They have launched a book award which will celebrate books (either fiction or biography) for young people aged 12+ which helps them to cope with the stresses and challenges of growing up. You can see the shortlist of books here.

If you want a chance to win them, all you have to do is enter a competition on the National Year of Reading site. Just describe a time when reading a book helped you to feel better.
The competition closes on the 14th of November, 2008

Twilight fans in need of a new fix

WARNING! THESE LINKS CONTAIN SPOILERS. ONLY CLICK ON THEM IF YOU HAVE READ ALL FOUR BOOKS IN THE SERIES.

If, like me, you have finished all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and feel bereft, there is hope.

Stephenie has been working on Midnight Sun, which tells the story of Edward and Bella from Edward's point of view. Unfortunately the draft was illegally leaked on the internet, and so she has put the book on hold for a while.

However, all is not lost. Stephanie decided to release this draft online for all fans to see, knowing that they would otherwise be torn between reading it and obeying the law. She is anxious that people don't view it in the same light as her work:

I'd rather my fans not read this version of Midnight Sun. It was only an incomplete draft; the writing is messy and flawed and full of mistakes. But how do I comment on this violation without driving more people to look for the illegal posting? It has taken me a while to decide how and if I could respond. But to end the confusion, I've decided to make the draft available . This way, my readers don't have to feel they have to make a sacrifice to stay honest. I hope this fragment gives you further insight into Edward's head and adds a new dimension to the Twilight story. That's what inspired me to write it in the first place.

To read the draft click here. It is a pdf file, if it doesn't work look for the Midnight Sun Partial Draft link on Stephenie Meyer's page here.

Only love can break your heart: The Twilight saga

Isabella Swan
Edward Cullen
Jacob Black

To the initiated these names will spark a rush of enthusiasm and outpouring of emotion; to the unknowing they are still just names.

Until this September they were just names I'd vaguely heard about, it was only when term started and 6 different people urged me to read the books that I began to take notice.

I read Twilight last month and immediately fell in love: with the characters, the concept, the setting, the DRAMA. There is something so overblown and luscious about these books that perfectly captures the exquisit feeling of falling in love for the first time.
Except in Bella Swan's case, this first love is more complicated than most, because Edward Cullen, her heart's desire, is in fact. a vampire.

17 year old Bella has moved to the rainy and gloomy tiny town of Forks in Washington State to live with her father Charlie, the town cop. Self conscious and missing the heat of her hometown, Phoenix, Bella is drawn to the other wordly Edward Cullen who is passing as 17 year old student at the high school.
This is the preface from the book:

I'd never given much thought to how I would die -- though I'd had reason enough in the last few months -- but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

I knew that if I'd never gone to Forks, I wouldn't be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn't bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

A larger extract can be found at the Twilight saga fan site


To say much more would spoil the plot, all I can do is urge you to read Twilight and the other books in the quartet:












Eclipse












Breaking Dawn

Fewer or Less?

Supermarkets have been getting it wrong!

When you queue up with your basket in the "10 items or Less" aisle and look at the sign, you are observing a basic grammatical error.

The sign should read 10 Items or FEWER.

This is because we use "FEWER" for something we can definitely count e.g. "There are fewer than 3 chickens in the coop"

You use LESS when you can't specify the quantity eg "there is less air than before in the tyre".

After pressure from the Campaign for Plain English, Tesco is changing their signs to "Up to 10 Items", thus avoiding annoying people like me complaining about their bad grammar! You can read about it here. If you want more grammar hints, you can visit this lovely clear site.

Guardian Children's fiction prize 2008

The longlist for the Guardian's annual Children Award has been announced. Going to the link here will give you reviews and descriptions of all the books listed. I haven't read any of them yet, but I will be checking some of them out over the summer holidays to read. The ones i like the look of include
The Bog Child by Siobahn Dowd (her earlier book A Swift Pure Cry is one of my favourites),
before i die by Jenny Downham,
Bad Blood (looks spooky!) by Rhiannon Lassiter
and The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

There is a competition open to under 16s . All you have to do is write a review of not more than 200 words on one of the longlisted books and submit it, with an entry form, to the Guardian.

Spelling reform- how do you spell fish? G-H-O-T-I*

In Portugal, the government has voted to change how the language is spelt to make it more logical. All silent letters (the equivalent of our k in 'knight' or the w in 'write') are now banished. Could something like that ever happen here? Guardian columnist Marcel Berlins seems to think it should:

" Many thousands of other English words bear the burden of unpronounced consonants, whose only function is to confuse schoolchildren into even more spelling mistakes than is their custom. For instance, a recent report found that only around half of English 11-year-olds could correctly spell the word doubt. A survey a few years ago concluded (I could have told them and saved them the money) that the more a word was spelled like it was pronounced, the more likely it would be spelled correctly.

There is no reason why we should not copy their example. Instead of bemoaning children's waning spelling aptitudes, and blaming teachers, syllabuses and the malign effect of text messaging, let us put the blame where it belongs: an insane spelling system. I am not suggesting we impose a completely new alphabetical structure on English orthography, as George Bernard Shaw and others have advocated. Shaw's proposed alphabet was a complicated affair, almost impossible to learn. The Portuguese way is more of a tidying up operation, eliminating incongruities and inconsistencies. We could do the same, with the help of a few English profs, and if we ended up with a lot of seudo-sychopaths with soriasis and siatica writing a senario about rathful sychologists rapping reaths rongly - well, at least schoolchildren will be spelling better.

*How do you pronounce the word spelled "ghoti"? The answer is "fish" - the "gh" as in laugh, the "o" as in women, the "ti" as in motion."

If this seems tricky to you, think how tough it must be to learn English as a second language!

Spelling

Spelling has been in the news a lot lately, so to test your skills here is a fiendishly hard quiz.

Shamefully, I only got half of it right, so it is back to the dictionary for me!

Guardian spelling quiz

Another important thing to learn is the correct spellings of homophones(words which sound (phone) the same (homo) but are spelled differently. The BBC has a quiz where you can check your skills

BBC Homophone quiz

Frankenstein

Many of you have enjoyed reading the story of Frankenstein, and now know a bit more about this famous story. The original novel was written in 1816 by an 18 year old Mary Shelley as a result of a story telling contest. The internet has many resources to do with this novel. You can read the original here, or if that is too daunting, a good summary can be seen on this site.

Thomas Edison (who invented the light bulb!) made a short film in 1910 about Frankenstein. Obviously the quality is not that of today's films, but it makes for an interesting 12 minutes!

A Shakespeare game online

The BBC has a fantastic MURDER MYSTERY Shakespeare game called the Seven Noble Kinsmen for you to play online. It has over 2 hours of game play and lots of mini games. You have to become a member bbc online which is very easy (and free!). You can also find out which male or female Shakespearean character you are most like.

This site has 4 games to play

• How well do you understand Elizabethan English? Test your brain with the SAT—Shakespeare Aptitude Test.
• Are you ready for Hamlet's Duel? Only your knowledge of Shakespeare trivia and quick responses can help Hamlet defeat Laertes (or else he'll be skewered by his opponent).
• Think you really know Shakespeare's memorable quotes? Find out in Name That Play.
• Truly, What's In A Name? Help Juliet find out as she plays a Shakespearean dating game to uncover the identity of three potential suitors

Could YOU have been a success like Shakespeare if you'd lived in the 16th century? This game will let you make the choices- see if you are a winner!

Another quick game to play, especially if you like figuring out words is this fill-in-the -gaps game. You can choose from several plays.

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

Wednesday 23rd of April is William Shakespeare's 444th birthday. Well, at least we THINK it is. We know that Shakespeare DIED on April 23 1616 because we have a record of his death, but we only assume his his birthday is on the 23 because he was baptised 3 days later on the 26th of April. It is probably no coincidence that St George's day falls on the 23 April as well!

Shakespeare wrote fantastic plays and poems, and is regarded as England's best and most famous playwright. Some of is most famous plays are A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III. You may even have heard some of his sonnets at weddings such as Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment..) or the very famous Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?).

One thing which Shakespeare did really well was reinvent the English language. He used 29,066 different words in his works in around 100,000 lines of writing- pretty impressive. Did you know tht Shakespeare actually invented a lot of words that we use today? Words like advertising, caked, compromise, elbow, eyeball, lonely, worthless and gossip. If you follow the link you can even see where abouts in his works they appear.
But it's not just words, Shakespeare also invented a lot of phrases we use all the time in our everyday speech. If you've talked about finding out the naked truth, talked about your flesh and blood or turned into a green eyed monster, then you've used a Shakespearean phrase!

Finally, entertain yourself by generating some genuine Shakespearian insults- lots of fun!

Book Review- The Ruby in The Smoke

"On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.

She was a person of sixteen or so -alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blonde hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man."

That opening to Philip Pullman's first Sally Lockhart adventure, The Ruby in the Smoke packed a narrative punch. As soon as I read it, questions flooded my brain. I had been scared to read this as I enjoyed the Northern Lights trilogy so much that anything without Lyra and Will in seemed pointless. I didn't see the BBC adaptation of the novel, so I went in blind, my favourite way to read a book. The story is set in Victorian London and follows the adventures of the recently orphaned Sally Lockhart, 16 and a more unconventional Victorian heroine you could not imagine. Sally is clever, good with a gun, can speak Hindustani and balance an account book as well as an accountant. Her adventure starts when she receives a mysterious message from a friend of her recently drowned father who was involved in the world of shipping. The words "the Seven Blessings" lead to a world of secrets, Chinese gangsters, opium, riddles, extreme danger and of course, the mysterious ruby in the title. Along the way Sally is befriended by a photographer and his equally unconventional sister who try to help her make sense of the mysterious dangers that surround her.
This book gripped me from the start, and I was soon thrust into Sally's world. There is a real sense of danger and menace, this is not a Victorian world of lace curtains and tea shops; villainy lurks on every corner. I can't wait to read the remaining books in the series!

Hobbit book fetches high price

A first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit sold for £6,000 at an auction in Norfolk. The book was first published in September 1937, and only 1,500 were ever printed. They sold out by December and so are very, very rare. ABEBooks sold a first edition in the original dust jacket for $65,000. If you look here, you can see how expensive these editions are. This article will fill you in on all the various editions. If you are interested in seeing various different covers, then this website has many different examples of cover art.

Beowulf

Beowulf is one of the oldest poems in the English language. Written sometime between 800 and 1100 AD, it tells the story of Beowulf, a brave warrior who fought many monsters. The British Library holds the only remaining copy of the poem, pictured on the left. This was nearly destroyed in a fire in the 1700s, so it's a good job the library has digitised it!

Beowulf is written in Old English which looks very different to the Modern English which we use today.
If you listen carefully, you can hear some similarities with the English we speak 1,000 years later. The British library has a link to a reading of a passage from Beowulf in the original Old English here. In this passage, reproduced here from the website,

The Danish king speaks to Beowulf, telling him of the terrible place where Grendel's mother lived. He describes the desolate landscape: the wolf-haunted slopes, perilous paths through the marshes, a mountain stream that plunges into the earth, and a lake overhung with trees bound in eternal frost, whose waters burn at night with a dreadful fire. A stag chased by hounds allows itself to be torn apart rather than plunge into those waters. It is a dark, misty and fearful place. Hrothgar offers rich rewards of twisted gold if Beowulf can find and kill the monster and escape with his life.

Can you find any similarities with Modern English?

If you want to read a translation into Modern English, you can find several online. This one is known as the Gummere translation and was done in 1910. It is very poetic and uses a lot of alliteration, just like the oiginal.
Below is a selection from the text, describing Grendel's attack on Beowulf's men

He spied in hall the hero-band,
kin and clansmen clustered asleep,
hardy liegemen. Then laughed his heart;
for the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn,
savage, to sever the soul of each,
life from body, since lusty banquet
waited his will! But Wyrd forbade him
to seize any more of men on earth
after that evening. Eagerly watched
Hygelac's kinsman his cursed foe,
how he would fare in fell attack.
Not that the monster was minded to pause!
Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior
for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder,
the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams,
swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus
the lifeless corse was clear devoured,
e'en feet and hands.

A very addictive game

Multipopword is just like Blogger, except you are playig online against others. You have to drag your mouse over adjoining letters to create words, building up your score. You cannot stop at just one game...

Much Ado About Nothing

SATS are fast approaching, and one of the biggest concerns for pupils is the Shakespeare Paper. Y8s and Y9s are studying Much Ado About Nothing this year, so I thought I would collate a few sites that might be worth a look.
Firstly, the 2 key scenes- the first one is from Act 4 Scene 1 and covers lines 196-325.
You can find it here, at the BBC bitesize website.
The second key comes at the very end of the play, Act 5 Scene 4 (the whole scene). You can find it here, on the previous site.

The Bitesize site also contains an excellent summary of the play.

If you find it helpful to listen to information when you revise, you may like these podcasts. They contain actors from the Globe Theatre's production of Much Ado discussing how the character feel and act in the key scenes. You can download them as MP3 files or listen to them on the site.

The SparkNotes sites has some good summaries and discussions of key themes and ideas in the play.

Finally, set your video/sky+/other gizmo to record the revision programme on Much Ado on the 13 March, 4am-6am on BBC2.

Romeo and Juliet quiz

Click here for full screen version

Click here for full screen version

Adventure stories Y7- Tolkien stories

Some of my favourite adventure stories and poems.

I always say how fabulous Northern Lights trilogy by Philip Pullman is, simply because it's true. Over Christmas I re-read Northern Lights and the Subtle Knife, and I'm pleased to say that the film hasn't spoiled my love of them. I still see the characters in my head as I first saw them, not as the actors on the screen.

One film which I think is actually better than the books on which it is based it The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. If you want to quest for some background information, you could try doing the cyber hunt here. The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R.R. Tolkien, who also wrote The Hobbit.

One site that explains the background to the books is the Tolkien Trail, which has allsorts of games, explaations and interesting information about the author and the books. This section has lots of fun games to play based on the books; you don't need any prevous knowledge so just dive in! You may want a tour to familiarise you with the creatures of Middle Earth or their Weapons and Items. Middle Earth is, of course, the place where Tolkien's stories are set.

One famous scene in The Hobbit is where Bilbo Baggins( uncle of Frodo from LOTR) wins the ring from Gollum in a riddle contest. Visit this website for the rest of the riddles. The answer to this one is in white Text below it, so highlight it with your mouse to find the answer!

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Time