Welcome to Comedy Classroom for secondary schools

BBC Comedy Classroom provides teachers with a brilliant framework for young people to explore comedy writing and develop key literacy skills. Focusing on comedy writing is a perfect match for secondary level core curriculum requirements and for teaching English across the UK.

As well as a series of three 60-minute teaching sequences, the BBC Comedy Classroom pack also contains top tips from comedians, comedy industry producers and writers.

By using the resources in the pack and online, you will be able to help students address key literacy outcomes which have been drawn from the National Curriculum in England, the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, The Northern Ireland Curriculum and the Curriculum for Wales.

Click here to view the full outcomes this resource can deliver.

By using these resources your students will…

• Communicate clearly and confidently with an audience and also through evaluating their own work and the work of others
• Demonstrate the ability to gain, maintain and monitor the interest of an audience
• Consider how texts can be changed to appeal to different audiences
• Be able to assess the effectiveness of their own and others' writing and suggest improvements

All the activities and resources are designed to inspire you and your class or group to have fun with writing and to motivate students of all abilities. It really is designed to be flexible. Dip in and out of the Comedy Toolbox, put on your creative hat and encourage your pupils to ‘have a write laugh’ and start tickling those funny bones!

The resources are broken down in to 3 categories

• Class Joker
  Stand-up comedy – the writer performs words that put across their own particular view of the world

• Class Act
  Sketch comedy – the writer turns a funny idea into a scene that people can perform

• Class Comic
  Caption comedy – the writer looks at an image and creates a funny line to go with it

You can access lesson plans, student-facing slides, and BBC archive clips from this page.

Class Joker - Stand-up comedy

Students will write a comedy script and perform their stand-up routine. They will learn how to put across their own particular view of the world in their own words.

Students will script and perform a unique sketch. They will learn how to turn a funny idea into a scene that can be performed by more than one person.

Students will view the images and devise and write appropriate comedy captions in the spaces provided for each image.