By Sam Holyman As I settle down to my morning cuppa, one of the 100 million cups of tea that are likely to be drunk in the UK today [1], I wonder about how sustainable I am being, after I sling my used teabag straight into the black bin. Many of my friends collect their […]
By Sam Holyman Are you concentrating at the end of term? At school we are getting ready for the new academic year, sorting labs, stock taking and making sure everything is labelled. And concentration has become the hot topic of debate! We use the term concentration all the time, and in everyday life this gets […]
Successful comprehension is what allows children to acquire and apply new knowledge, to communicate successfully, and ultimately, to be academically successful. However, good comprehension is more than simply processing single words or sentences; it’s the reader having a coherent understanding of the meaning of the text as a whole. To do this, they need to […]
Part of our series of posts that focus on a key character from exam set texts. Offering alternative interpretations and insights, these are ideal for sharing with students as they revise and prepare for their English Literature exams. We are often told that Lady Macbeth challenges the stereotype of women. It has become a stereotype […]
Following an inspiring Association for Science Education (ASE) conference this month, Amie Hewish, Head of Secondary Science at Oxford University Press, calls for collaboration in continuing to develop an exciting, knowledge-rich curriculum in science. I’ve just got back from the ASE conference, and what a great few days it was. Teachers, technicians, educators, assessors, and […]
When Euclid wrote about ratios of lengths and areas and similarity, without algebra, theorems were dependent on spatial representations. Five diagrams, all related to each other, appear in his text in various places, so I designed a ‘Match the theorem’ task in the manner of Malcolm Swan’s tasks. There isn’t a one-to-one correspondence and you […]
Written by lexicographer Roz Combley There’s nothing like the real thing I was recently lucky enough to analyse the Oxford Corpus, a 55-million-word collection of children’s writing from the BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words story competition. Any lexicographer will tell you that once you’ve worked with a corpus—a wonderfully powerful resource of real language evidence—you […]