How do you feel today?

Working at a school this Friday, I came across a resource that I really liked but I could see that, with a few tweaks, it could be even more useful. So, I’ve made my own version of it.

Each ‘emoticon’ has beneath it a strip of five boxes that could indicate intensity or that could be [...]

Exploring deductive reading

This is a resource that is part of the Teaching Inference and Deduction materials that I presented at our English Conference recently. It’s function is to serve as a thinking chart during an activity that simulates the fact that able readers frequently predict and reflect on reasonable reading conclusions.

At the conference I used a (very) [...]

Tracking Characters

Here’s one of my resources from the recent Conference (see previous post). This is an exercise that helps students to explore one of the skills of reading to deduce: how able readers can track multiple characters in a text.
The important element in using this piece of work with a group is not to focus on [...]

Conference 09

Here, as promised, is the PowerPoint from my session at our recent Regional English Conference.This is an annual event hosted in Doncaster to support the teaching of English in the north east of England.
For those of you unable to attend, it was another excellent event chock full of ideas for teaching English. There were brilliant [...]

Understanding AQA English GCSE

Here is a resource that I made today to help my students understand the structure of their examinations in GCSE English. It gives you a way to teach ‘the big picture’ in an active fashion by presenting the students with a partially completed chart of the two examinations. They are then asked to use the [...]

IWB choice

If, like me, you use an interactive whiteboard (or IWB for the acronym obsessed) for much of the active content of lessons, then you’ll often find yourself feeling frustrated by the software developers behind such devices.
In the UK there are two varieties of IWB that have found favour in our secondary schools, abbreviated by teachers [...]

Doing Lit. with reluctant learners

One of the joys of my teaching life is to find ways to bring the learner to the learning no matter where they start from. This skill has been tested recently as I have been working with a group of highly reluctant (some might say ‘resistant’ or even ‘out and out hostile’) learners.
In my school [...]

Audacity

Ah, it must be Monday again and, ensconced in my comfy thinking chair, I thought it would be a good time to share a few practical tips on using audio in lessons.
Firstly, if you haven’t already done so, investigate the wonderful computer program, called Audacity. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing [...]

Sometimes you find the perfect thing

Ever heard of SnagIt? Well, this post is one for those ICT-curious teachers who are looking for tools that can create (among others things) interactive resources for their students.
I must admit I am attracted by the possibility of using Flash animations in my lessons but simply do not deem such labour-intensive resources worthwhile for everyday [...]

Talking Maths (and English)

This week, among other things, I was asked to kick-off a development session on talk. The brief was straightforward enough – a bit of a background on the importance of talk to learning and then outline one strategy for supporting extended talk in the classroom. Straightforward indeed, but then, as I began pulling together my [...]