Everything you need to teach Colder Than Here for the Leaving Cert English Comparative Study (Higher Level) in one download: the Student Textbook your class reads from, the Teacher Guide you prepare from, and the free Text Suitability Guide alongside them.

Myra Bradley has advanced bone cancer and six to nine months to live, and she spends them organising her own funeral: choosing a woodland burial ground, presenting the arrangements to her family on PowerPoint, and ordering a flat-pack cardboard coffin that arrives in the living room to be painted with stars. Her husband cannot speak about any of it and fixes things instead. Nine scenes, no acts, ninety minutes, alternating strictly between the burial grounds and a living room with a broken boiler. As a comparative choice it offers a modern, secular, comfortable world with no ritual left for death, a play with no narrator at all in which character is built from objects rather than speeches, and the rare case of an outlook that brightens as the illness worsens. The bundle covers all four Higher Level modes (Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or Issue, and General Vision and Viewpoint), and every comparison point is partner-agnostic, so the set works whatever texts you pair the play with.

What’s included (three PDF files)

• Student Textbook (33 pages): the play analysed in continuous prose students can read independently. Each mode chapter opens with a “Reading for this mode” primer and “What the examiners ask”, works through the play’s key moments with close readings and key-moment, object and technique tables, and closes with a sample comparative paragraph the student completes with their second text, “Setting this text against others” notes, and a comparison grid: the Colder Than Here column filled in, the Text 2 and Text 3 columns left for their own combination. Eight original, SEC-style practice questions, two per mode, end the book. Licensed for the purchasing teacher to copy for their own students.
• Teacher Guide (25 pages): your preparation, done. A full sensitive-content briefing and practical notes before you teach; the play read for the teacher, from story and structure to the outlook; a key-moments bank and a quotation and reference bank, every entry tagged with what it evidences and the modes it serves; each mode broken down into what examiners reward, where the play is strong, what to teach and the errors to pre-empt; a workable teaching sequence built around reading it aloud and staging two scenes properly; notes on running the textbook’s grids, sample paragraphs and practice questions in class; coupling guidance for choosing partner texts; assessment essentials (PCLM marking, the PEAL paragraph shape, timing and length); and question-angle banks drawn from recent SEC papers.
• Text Suitability Guide (2 pages, free): the at-a-glance overview: synopsis, themes, sensitive content, and the play’s strengths in the comparison modes at both Higher and Ordinary Level.

The comparison grid rows are identical across every Prescribed Shelf comparative Student Textbook, so if your other texts are covered too, the three books line up row by row for your exact text combination.

Buy the bundle and save on the separate prices. Written by a practising teacher.