Yesterday, at the NATE conference, I was lucky enough to listen to Tessa Hadley discuss how we might engage students in their creative writing. She advocated using the parables of Jorge Luis Borges whose writing can be incredibly dense and yet at other times deals with complex ideas with such clarity. If you haven’t read any… Continue reading Using Borges for creative writing
This idea of layered writing comes from here: https://classteaching.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/layered-writing/ The layered writing grid that Gav McCusker used was structured for descriptive writing (which I’ve also adapted and will blog about later). This is the original grid: Excited by trying this out, I adapted it for some paper 2 q5 type writing that we’re doing with year… Continue reading Using the layered writing technique for persuasive writing
Question 4 on paper 2 is another comparison question – only this time you need to do more than compare content – you have to think about a) the writer’s viewpoint and b) how they convey this viewpoint We’ve been looking at two texts about prisons – see here and now we have to compare for… Continue reading Question 4 on paper 2
This is the language question. It will ask you to focus on a particular part of the text. The question will look something like this: In this section, how does Mayhew use language to describe the prison? The mark scheme asks you to think about this: Explain, comment on and analyse how writers use language… Continue reading Question 3 Language
I’ve been thinking about how to get students to articulate their feelings and I had a look at the AQA specimen assessment materials as well as the mark schemes. The new language question 3 on paper 2 (and question 2 on paper 1) asks us to look at AO2: the extract below is… Continue reading What to say about the effects of language – tackling the language questions
QUESTION 2 This is the comparing and synthesising question. Remember that there is another comparison question on question 4, so we need to make sure we know what we need to do in each of them. Question 2 is really comparing details about content – don’t worry about the language effects, methods and all that… Continue reading Y10 exam revision paper 2 question 2
We looked at two texts about prisons. One from Henry Mayhew (19th century) and one from a blog post written by Alex Cavendish (see here for the blog). The two texts are reproduced below: Source A: Henry Mayhew visits a prison The next moment a stream of some dozen or two prisoners poured from the… Continue reading Preparing for a Paper 2 exam
So after teaching Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for several weeks, we did an exam type question. If you read through the Jekyll and Hyde thread, you will see the activities that we did in the lead up to this assessment, but I was particularly proud of the timing of the socratic talk because this… Continue reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – some student responses
Mr Hanson's English 