Progression in writing to describe

In Stella Gibbons’ 1932 comic masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm, the author obligingly stars the most purple of descriptive passages with one, two or three stars to allow readers to skip or admire her descriptions. The first of her starred passages is a description of the eponymous farm and begins:
“Dawn crept over the Downs like a [...]

More origami books

For me the Christmas holidays are all about catching up with friends who I have neglected so woefully during term time. One such friend is Nicky who teaches in a school for students with special educational needs here in Rotherham. Chatting with her yesterday, she described a rather excellent lesson on myths and legends that [...]

Little bits of learning

I am feeling guilty for not having ‘blogged’ much in the past few weeks: I wouldn’t like you to think I’d forgotten about you. The truth is mundane (isn’t it always) – I have not been innovating quite as much as I usually do.
The trouble is, this part of the school year is far from [...]

Innovation in writing for £30

My school equipped me with a laptop; my local education authority gave me use of a portable interactive whiteboard; and I’ve even recycled a cast-off TV from a friend, finding it a new lease of life in my classroom. Yet there is one piece of kit that I have found more versatile than any of [...]

Invisible differentiation

We’ve all heard that metaphor for swans – you know the one, bird serenely gliding on the surface hiding legs frantically paddling beneath. It’s an image that often comes to mind when I see the best teachers. Of course, make it look too easy and observers think it is; a trap that newly qualified teachers [...]

Saw this and thought of you

In teaching the best ideas are often very simple ones. This ‘prompt pyramid’ is easy to make and has been designed to promote progression in young writers. The four faces contain prompts for ambitious vocabulary; sentence openers; punctuation; and connectives. What’s more, the bands on each face connect to the level of a student’s response. [...]

Improving sentence variety

Working with my Year 8 class has been fun this week. I planned to tackle a few of the ‘more challenging’ learning objectives in order to prepare them for the transition to Year 9 and the inevitable assessments at the end of the Key Stage. In particular, I have been wanting to return to the [...]

Teaching paragraphing

Paragraphing can be seen as a difficult skill to master by some students and even some adults find it a bit tricky. It isn’t of course especially when you know the TiPToP paragraphing rule. In case you haven’t come across this mnemonic, TiPToP stands for Time, Place, Topic and Person. These are the four reasons [...]

Reluctant writers, freeware and “fridge magnet” poetry

No doubt we’ve all seen shops selling “poetry fridge magnets” made up of words taken from well-known poets. The idea being that you stick them to a fridge door and, in an idle moment, rearrange them to make poems.
It struck me that behind this was a principle that we could use in class particularly with [...]

Board games in English

Happy memories of rainy afternoons as a child inspired this one. Despite living in a world rich in technology there is still low-tech fun to be had with a bit of paper, some counters and a butterfly pin!
I designed this game board originally for use with Year 8 students but have since used it in [...]