And if you’re doing WJEC

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

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 from the perspective of a speaker returning to the ‘new’ South Africa.

I wanted a way to help my students begin to understand the injustices of that system and so gave them the following starter with the instruction to have a guess at the missing figures. The starter sparked some pretty lively debate and gave the students some sense of why apartheid was so abhorrent.

The file is available to download below.
Apartheid Facts.doc