Boy, Everywhere is a story of survival, of family, of bravery. It looks at the refugee crisis from a new perspective, and through Sami’s eyes shows that we are all one cruel twist of fate away from becoming refugees ourselves: it can happen to anyone. Historical context By 2015, the war in Syria had been […]
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Fresh Start is a catch-up and intervention programme for 9- to 13-year-olds who are struggling to learn how to read.
Here are four reasons to try Fresh Start in your primary or secondary school.
I don’t know about you, but I look forward to introducing a new class reader with the various classes I teach. There’s something about the opportunity to share great literature with young people and also have the chance to share my own passion as a reader. It’s always enjoyable to challenge myself with a new […]
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‘Cultured…Engaged…Informed’. This vision strapline underpins everything we do in my English Department. Vocabulary teaching, naturally, plays an important role in fulfilling this vision. When we spoke to students about the disadvantages that poor vocabulary acquisition brings, the one that came up repeatedly was that of frustration – the inability to communicate that which is in […]
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For very good reason the last several years has witnessed an explosion in thinking about effective revision strategies, with an increasing focus on self-testing and retrieval. As we increasingly use and model these skills in our own classrooms so too do students increasingly use them in their own independent practice. Yet, whilst we may be […]
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The Oxford Children’s Language Team reflect on the Government’s white paper for schools, highlighting the importance of vocabulary.
Read more Recently, I’ve been playing around with and using a lot of Oxford University Press Shakespeare materials and resources, which are proving to be excellent. In particular, I’ve been experimenting with their ‘Macbeth GCSE Revision Workbook’ by Graham Elsdon, which is part of the Oxford School Shakespeare series. I’ve been using this in the more traditional […]
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A perennial issue for English teachers is how best to prepare students for English Language. This is for good reason. Without a specific body of knowledge to teach, such as a literary text, it can all too easily descend into vague discussions orbiting around examination papers. In my own teaching, in order to address this, […]
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As the winter months start to recede, the education community is faced with the reality that so far this year, teaching and learning continues to be dominated, in a wide variety of ways, by Covid. The prevalence of the Omicron variant has resulted in a high incidence of teacher and student absences and many learners […]
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Disciplinary Literacy has been identified by the EEF as the number one strategy for improving the literacy of students within secondary schools. It is a term which encompasses the unique ways students must be able to read, write and speak in each individual subject area. This article sets out ways in which you can employ […]
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