AEIS English Lesson 2 — Opening with Speech

What's inside

Lesson 2 of the LearnUp AEIS English series — a complete 90-minute composition lesson on starting a narrative with a line of speech, pitched at Secondary 2 entry and aligned to the LearnUp SPARK framework's opening (SETUP) paragraph. It opens with an 11-item punctuation diagnostic, then gives clear notes on why a dialogue hook grips the reader, the five rules for punctuating direct speech (speech marks, capital letters, end marks inside the quotes, the comma before the tag, and a new line for each speaker), the four kinds of opening — the cry, the whisper, the command and the question — and how to anchor the spoken line with the SPEECH + tag + action-beat formula so the dialogue never floats. A six-exercise worksheet builds from punctuating single lines up to writing a full opening, followed by three annotated model openings that are pulled apart to show why each hook works. The homework mirrors the AEIS paper: punctuation multiple-choice, rewriting flat openings as speech openings, and two opening paragraphs of the student's own. All material is original LearnUp content. The student booklet runs to 11 pages; a separate answer key is available as a download below.

How to use it

Follow the method in the workbook — read aloud, cover-and-recite, check, sleep on it, recite again the next morning. One paragraph per day, six days a week, finishes the workbook in under a month. On exam day, pick the paragraph that matches the prompt's emotion, swap the marked words, add a sentence either side. Done in under a minute.