In many ways, writing resources is like doing crosswords, or sudoku - a mindful, intensely satisfying experience (when you get them right) ... and that always, always begins with working out what you want your students to be able to do with them ...
Resources should never be about keeping students occupied - I only usually write them for MY classes if there's a problem I need solving. In this case, my Y10 class are struggling with two issues in their studies of The Sign of the Four:
identifying and remembering key quotations; and
their grasp of the dreaded subject terminology
So. Half-term. Marking done, and a little time on my hands. What's a man like me going to do? Write a resource which hopefully addresses both those issues. Et voila ...
Our final destination is intended to be a situation where the students are more readily recalling the quotations, and where they have got into the habit of handling subject terminology so frequently they can do it without thinking (or using the relevant pages of their planners as a crib sheet). It's for my lessons, then, to explore things like the writer's intention and analysing their choice of tools.
At the moment, here's how I'm intending to use the resource as follows:
set it as an open-book homework, probably with a low-stakes peer assessment;
try a closed-book, in-class exercise;
use the results of that to inform some spaced-retrieval tasks
... all the while drip-feeding similar resources for later chapters. Ultimately, we might look at things like producing clusters of icons/quotations with the hope that students will be more confidently able to connect different parts of the novel. With blanks being available for the class via Teams, they can always test themselves as part of their revision programme, although I'll probably look at developing the resource further to include links to context, and so on, for that specific purpose.
As ever, I'm posting this in the hope that if you use the resource you'll provide some feedback on how it works for you and your students ... get in touch!