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 [...]

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 [...]

The power of a continuum

Today was my first lesson with my fantastic Year 10 group after their recent half-term holiday. Minutes before it began, I wondered if they had remembered all our recent work on Othello?
I began with a simple exercise. The task was to consider twelve of Othello’s actions and to place them on a continuum from least [...]

Extending answers

The blog finally gets audio!
I thought I’d share a little piece of my work with Year 10 English today. This group is described on the timetable as a ‘less-able, less-motivated group’ of students with low abilities. Some teachers might even refer to the class dismissively as a ‘bottom set’. I hate the term myself. To [...]

The music in the words

How often do we utilise our students’ musical abilities when teaching English? Pop music may be central to the average teenager’s life but it’s fairly rare for us to use our students’ musical intelligence to support their understanding of language.
Today’s challenge was to help my Year 11 students appreciate ‘the music’ in Robert Browning’s stunning [...]

Making up words

At the end of an intense period of learning there are often a few moments where students are at ease and free for a few seconds to resume playful behaviours that were postponed when they entered your classroom.
One such moment occurred recently in my Year 11 group. Jane, a very hard-working student, took up a [...]

The Merry Wives and Husbands Dating Agency

In 1582, what would a dating agency have looked like?
This was one of the odd thoughts that passed through my mind last night as I wrote the ‘dating agency profile card’ for the young William Shakespeare.
The task was to introduce my Year 11 students to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Anne Hathaway in as stimulating [...]

Paperchains of love

Carol Ann Duffy’s psychologically rich poem, Havisham, prompted me to develop a new starter this week. Students were given a strip of paper which I made by cutting an A3 sheet into several strips lengthwise. They were asked to write the word ‘love’ at one end and then to devise ‘an emotional scale’. This meant [...]

Bridging culture gaps

Just a quick posting today. With my Year 10 Students, I began to teach Tatamkhulu Afrika’s poem, Nothing’s Changed. This is required reading for GCSE students taking the AQA course but is a very challenging poem for students born in the 1990s.
Briefly, it deals with the poet’s reflections on South Africa in its post-apartheid years [...]

Pie Chart Calculator

In the last few days I have been working on a scheme of work based on the topic of magazines. Getting a bit too giddy about a cross curricula numeracy link, I developed this interactive resource to guide less able students when creating pie charts.
The idea is that students read a selection of magazines and [...]