I suspect that when they read ‘ Why Closing the Word Gap Matters: Oxford Language Report ’, many teachers nodded in agreement but also, perhaps felt a little depressed by the picture it painted. The fact that many children arrive in school with limited vocabularies compared to their peers is well-known to early years teachers and that this gap persists through secondary school […]
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Jill Carter shares her advice for making the most out of quotations during this revision period. Students, teachers and parents worry about quotations or as they are now acceptably known quotes (in my day that was a verb…). ‘Eek – Macbeth – how can I learn a quote for every possible essay scenario?’ I […]
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Graham Elsdon looks at ways literature students can usefully write about drama By the play’s final scene, Macbeth sees life as ‘a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. There is a metatheatrical quality to many of Shakespeare’s works, yet some students find it hard to write about plays as plays. […]
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Jill Carter encourages teachers and students to spend time exploring and broadening vocabulary. Vocabulary is power. And, like a lot of power, it is hard won and easily lost. Students’ vocabulary is becoming increasingly limited in a world where it simply isn’t fashionable to exploit vocabulary for effect – in a world of posts, texts […]
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Author Pete Ellison explores the motivation and approach taken by the Catapult team during the development of the new Catapult resources. At a time when the demands of external assessment at KS2 and GCSE have never been higher, we know that many young people are not regularly reading for pleasure (recent research by the […]
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For the first few years of my teaching career, I would set revision lessons without much expectation. If you were going to do a test, you should at least give some chance of success by providing the lesson before for ‘revision’. I would often provide a list of suggested activities that students could pick from: […]
Read moreRebecca Geoghegan shares her advice for supporting ‘low ability readers’. You can also read her blog about approaches for supporting lower ability writers . When I hear the label ‘low ability reader’, I instantly think of the Allan Ahlberg poem ‘I am a Slow Reader’ which depicts the syllabification of words as the ‘slow reader’ gets to grips with the decoding […]
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Jill Carter shares her tips and thoughts about how to energise poetry lessons. Ask students if they like poetry and often the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Boys can be especially clear about this. I hear comments such as “I just don’t get it” and “It’s so boring”. It can be viewed as the […]
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Rebecca Geoghegan shares her approaches to supporting low-ability writers. Being asked to ‘write’ can be daunting for even the most confident and accurate of writers: at times we all struggle to think of something interesting and memorable to write. However, if your struggle is coupled with low literacy levels, then you are very likely to […]
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Welcome back! To get 2018 off to the best start and help you discover our comprehensive support for English Language and English Literature across all key stages, we’ve created this interactive guide. Click on the information icon to find out more about the specific resources.
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