Everything you need to teach Sive (John B. Keane) for the Leaving Cert English Comparative Study, Higher Level: the Student Textbook and the Teacher Guide together.

Sive is eighteen, illegitimate, and kept at school on her uncle’s charity in a north Kerry farmhouse that cannot afford her. The matchmaker arrives with an offer — two hundred pounds from an old farmer who wants her, and a hundred for himself — and her aunt sets about breaking down everyone in the house who might refuse. Her uncle gave his word to her dying mother and cannot hold it. A folk tragedy in two acts and one kitchen, with a travelling ballad singer and his father arriving at the door to curse, warn and finally lament. As a comparative choice it gives you a world that names its prices out loud — stock as status, a marriage brokered for a fee, illegitimacy as public record, the county home at the end of the line — and an ending that refuses to name a single culprit. The bundle covers all four modes: Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or Issue, and General Vision and Viewpoint. 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 (31 pages): continuous, exam-ready analysis written for students to read independently. A general introduction and a chapter on approaching the comparative question, then a full chapter on each mode — each opening with a “Reading for this mode” primer and “What the examiners ask”, working through close readings of two key moments with key-moment tables, and ending with a sample comparative paragraph (with slots for the student’s second text), “Setting this text against others” notes, and a comparison grid in which the Sive column is already filled in and the Text 2 and Text 3 columns are left blank. Eight original, SEC-style practice questions, two per mode, close the book. Licensed for the purchasing teacher to copy for their own students.
• Teacher Guide (24 pages): the preparation done for you. A frank before-you-teach briefing on sensitive content and practical notes; the play for the teacher (story and structure, voices and figures, the world of the play, themes read broadly, how the play is told, and the outlook); a key-moments bank and a quotation and reference bank holding the fifteen quotations that do the most work, every entry referenced by act and scene; all four modes broken down (what examiners reward, where the play is strong, what to teach, the errors to pre-empt, a strongest-answer line); a workable teaching sequence and the misreadings to pre-empt; notes on running the textbook’s grids, sample paragraphs, mode primers and practice questions; partner-agnostic coupling guidance; assessment essentials (PCLM as percentages, the PEAL paragraph shape, what lifts an answer, timing); 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 collection’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.

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