Hands up those who have taught students who have said that they found languages hard, that ‘they couldn’t do languages’ and that they were much better in other subjects? Certainly, during my career as a languages teacher, I have had numerous conversations with young people who felt that their knowledge and understanding of foreign languages […]
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The world has been a strange place for the last year or so. One of themes at the moment is transition – how will society transition from lockdown restrictions and back to normal, restriction free living? What will ‘normal’ even look like now? Has our idea of normal been replaced with something different? For year […]
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Eleonora Crovato revels in those lightbulb moments when students make connections with their previous learning. In this unusual year for year 6 to year 7 transition, Elenora shares what she will be doing to prepare for September. Every September I ask my new batch of year 7s the same question: what kind of science experiments […]
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This year, as with last year, we are shrouded in uncertainty about what we’ll be able to do when focusing on transition this year between KS2 and KS3. Rules and roadmaps are being rolled out and put in place. However we are all aware this may change and leave us needing to adapt more traditional […]
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OUP’s Bridging the Word Gap at Transition report gives it to us straight. As Jane Harley states in the Foreword: ‘This is a critical time for a focus on vocabulary development, particularly in the context of COVID-19 and the much-publicised broadening of the attainment gap’ Since its publication there have been regional lockdowns that have incorporated some of the poorest regions in England, […]
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With all the talk of a “catch-up curriculum”, what is my priority upon our return to in-person learning? Keeping great geography at the heart of my lessons. While I don’t want students to dismiss the past two months of learning as ‘irrelevant’, I also want to be mindful that some of the content covered simply […]
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Lionel Bolton, Head of English, Languages and Humanities, Oxford University Press Read the report What have we discovered? Our new report, Bridging the Word Gap at Transition, builds on our previous report from 3 years ago, Why Closing the Word Gap Matters. In that first report we highlighted that nearly half of the children in Year 1 and […]
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Provided nothing changes between now and then, we are all due back into school in September. How that will look practically will vary from school to school as we all figure out how to make routines that work in our unique settings given the constraints imposed upon us for public health. Jemma Sherwood shares a […]
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Jemma Sherwood offers advice for the transition from Year 10 to Year 11 in September. As we look to have all year groups back in September, we are well aware that one of the groups who are most likely to be worried about the year ahead will be Year 10. So far, we know that […]
Read more It is coming up to the end of the school year and my thoughts are now starting to turn to the transition arrangements for the new Year 12s. Many questions are occupying my thoughts. How will they respond to being back in the classroom after so long? Will the extended break have had an impact […]
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