Welcome to a recording that might change the way that you think about neglected and abused children. Press the grey play button to hear it (and make sure that volume isn’t muted). The recording lasts 20 minutes.

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) short story which I separated into paragraphs and projected using PowerPoint. At the end of each paragraph, I invited pairs of readers to reflect on the main character and to write their thoughts in note form on the chart, placing them in an appropriate zone. This brought to the fore discussion on what exactly is a reasonable reading conclusion given the material. It also supported analysis of this aspect of reading to deduce by making the usually invisible, apparent.

Target Map.doc

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 the ‘right’ answers but rather to highlight the strategies that students have used to deduce them. It can be a very enlightening reading activity to use with pairs of readers and exposes some of those invisible reading skills that seem so mysterious to less able readers.

It’s an A3 resource so download and print accordingly.
Sykes & Nancy Chr Tracking.doc

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 sessions from Tara and Catherine on Writing to Describe; Charlotte on supporting ‘radical readers’; and Joy, Beth, Judith and Audrey gave us an amazing range of active strategies for teaching poetry.

Below is the link to download my notes on teaching deduction and inference in reading.

Teaching Deduction and Inference.ppt

I shall add copies of the resources that I used as part of the session soon. Check back to this blog in a few days for more!

Oh, and the tree? Well, that was our plenary activity. I’d assembled a few prunings in a pot at the front of the conference venue. At the end of the session, delegates wrote ideas on cut-out leaf shapes and were invited to add them to the bare branches. As you can see, those teaching ideas are blossoming in Doncaster!

A quick post to add the Welsh Board version of the GCSE structure activity from my previous post.

I’ve used the piece in a few schools now and it serves to remind (or inform!) students of the shape of their course and of the necessity to give more focus to the exam than they did the coursework element. It makes for a good starter to a revision session and has a very positive effect on the students’ level of confidence.

English GCSEs 2009 Structure Activity WJEC.doc

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 cut-ups provided to add extra information such as the dates of the exams; the assessment objectives; the primary focus of the test; and whether their anthology is required.

By thinking about the pieces of information given, students can deduce where the extra information goes. Well, that’s the theory anyway.

Print the Word document on A4 and copy to A3 paper with two sheets per side if possible.

What the students will end up with is hopefully a useful chart and, by actually processing the information, a better understanding of the structure of their assessment. You never know, it might even make them feel less stressed.

English GCSEs 2009 Structure Activity.doc

For almost all of the time I have been teaching, I have been spoilt. Of course I didn’t realise this until things changed but having one’s own teaching room is an enormous advantage in a teacher’s pressurised working day. Working from one room means there are a vital few minutes between one lesson and the next when the learning space can be reorganised to fit a new group.

Sadly, I no longer have that luxury and this means that it is I who have to move between rooms, carrying everything I might conceivably need for the next group of learners. Fortunately, each teaching room in my new school has a similar setup and is well equipped for sound, visuals and interactivity. Still, I’m always on the lookout for anything that might speed these transitions and when I came across Portable Apps, I knew it was just the sort of thing that could help.

Most of us now use USB pen drives and think nothing of keeping lesson resources on them that can be opened by a ‘host’ PC. However, we have all experienced the problem inherent in this when a file that we’ve created on one computer steadfastly refuses to open on another.

The problem of course is to do with what programs are installed on which computer. Say I make a PowerPoint presentation on my home PC and save it to my memory stick. I then take that memory stick to a classroom and expect my presentation to run as it did on my PC at home. This may or may not happen as I expect due to the different versions of PowerPoint available or indeed whether it is installed at all on the PC into which I plug my USB stick. These kinds of problems seem demonstrably worse when one is working with sound and video as there are so many different formats available for these types of files.

What Portable Apps offers is a way to change your pen drive into a mini-computer. The idea is simple, why stop at storing data when these pen drives are fast enough to run tiny versions of very useful programs. Thus, instead of carting about a laptop with your specific programs installed and connecting it to a projector or interactive whiteboard, you run your vital applications from a humble pen drive.

If you investigate the excellent PortableApps.com you will find that your pendrive can have a start menu not dissimilar to the Windows one. This menu will automatically run when you plug your pendrive into a new PC. Into that menu you might add programs such as VLC Media Player (a piece of software that allows you to play almost any video format) or Coolplayer (a very fast, easy-to-use audio player). Now you are no longer at the mercy of software installed on your institution’s PCs; you can work safe in the knowledge that your saved file will indeed play as expected.

And while we’re on the subject of Portable Apps, one of the programs that has been made portable goes by the moniker of PNotes. Once run, it places virtual post-its on your screen that can be typed on, saved and set to display on top of any other window or programs that you run. I use this tiny but essential program to display the learning objectives for my lessons, making the ‘post-it’ that contains them slightly transparent so that students can select whether they are looking at the learning objectives or indeed the material behind them.

It has long been a gripe of mine that those people who make interactive whiteboard software have not included an easy way to achieve this relatively simple effect: having learning objectives visible to students no matter what else is one screen. PNotes running from your pendrive makes this a very easy trick to pull off and your learning objectives are saved for next time too.

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 to the terms ‘Promethean’ and ‘Smart’. Of course each of these IWB ‘platforms’ has its own software to support resource development and lesson delivery.

In the case of Smart boards, this means using their proprietary ‘Notebook’ software and in the case of Promethean, ‘Activstudio’. Both have their merits. Travelling from school to school, I have had to make myself expert in each though this often means having two copies of the same resource depending on which board I’m using.

Smartech’s Notebook software is relatively easy to use and ‘feels’ much more polished than its main competitor’s effort. Currently in version 10, it uses a flip chart metaphor to produce lesson materials that can have multiple pages, attachments, simple animations, text and tables. Its most accomplished feature is its ‘gallery’ through which one can add interactive and multimedia elements that build very attractive active learning resources quickly. For example, using Notebook it takes less than 5 minutes to make a ‘vortex’ sorting activity that could be used as a starter for a lesson (see below).

By contrast, Promethean’s Activstudio is much harder to learn but, once mastered, offers greater control and flexibility of page objects. It does give a user access to additional resources via its website, Promethean Planet, but to build interesting interactive resources with Activstudio is a labour counted in hours rather than minutes. In addition, no one could claim that the Activstudio’s interface is anything other than uninspiring and, let’s be frank, ugly. The software interface is highly reminiscent of Windows 98 and looks outdated to the modern eye yet it can produce some very pleasing results if you are prepared to stick with it.

The trouble is, of course, that many teachers are not in a position to choose which IWB or attendant software platform they would prefer. To most of us, we are restricted to whatever is screwed firmly to our classroom wall. We are stuck with whatever choice our school managers made when these devices became de rigueur.

So in a ‘betamax-versus-vhs’ sort of way, teachers are caught in a format war that pits ‘easy but limited’ against ‘compex but versatile’. For what it’s worth my vote goes with Smart. And my reasoning? Well, an interactive whiteboard is no more than a useful tool for teaching and in that respect anything that allows teachers to make engaging interactive content quickly and efficiently has got to be the better option.

Just in case any of you out there would like to make some pop-up festive cards here’s how.

Unfold the card and re-fold it only on the long axis…

Now the tricky bit…

Decoration time…

Just the front of the card to go…

All the decorating pieces for cut-out figures and front designs can be found in the following file.

designs for pop up xmas cards.pdf

Have fun!

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 there exists a small group of learners referred to on the timetable as a ‘re-engagement’ group or ‘R-band’ class. These students are a very challenging group of individuals with extremely low self-esteem and a group identity based on hostility towards schooling (and teachers!) as well as all the familiar symptoms of disaffection. In lessons, they swear; they shout; they fight; they ignore; they truant; they resist; they challenge; they vandalise; they attack; they demand; they flaunt their bigotry; they verbally abuse; and they destroy what work they do complete. In short, they are as far from being receptive to learning as you can possibly imagine.

It was with this class that I was asked to plan lessons that would help them to understand some literary texts, namely two poems from the ‘different cultures’ section of the AQA anthology for GCSE. At this point I suspect ‘the youth today!’ lobby have just had all their prejudices confirmed about the sorry state of British youngsters and are reaching for their extreme solutions. But wait, did I mention that these same students are naive and frightened and damaged and desperately looking for structure (even though they will go to enormous lengths to kick against it).

Watching these students in class is fascinating. Yes, it’s an uneasy business of preparing for the next explosion and trying to make the most capital from brief moments of calm but it’s also oddly reassuring. In amongst all this damage are twelve or so distortions of what it is to be a child with all the attendant insecurities. There are also moments that would melt the heart of even the most cynical. For example, in one learning sequence they wrote picture books for five-year-olds and the care that the group put into the task together with their haphazard (but correct) discussion of the needs of such an audience were, well, charming.

Tackling the poems was going to be different though. I mean, its a well known fact that poetry is universally disliked by difficult and less able kids, right? Well… not exactly.

I began with the ’stories’ of the poems. Here I presented the group with a prose narrative of each poem for them to sequence as a ‘cut and stick’ exercise. The challenge was ‘find the story here’. Next I gave a range of pictures that might illustrate that ’story’. Then I asked the students to find anything in this poem that might ‘go with’ the pictures (and the narrative). The idea was to encourage the students to create a 2-D presentation of the poem with three different representations of its narrative: in prose, in image; and in the selection of fitting snippets from the text.

The results were remarkable. I braced myself for chaos – there were scissors and glue involved after all – and had prepared a standby option but it was not needed. Before putting these pieces on display, I photographed some as a record of what was achieved.

If you’d like the resources used, they can be downloaded below.

Blessing narrative

Blessing flipchart

Blessing photosheet