Filter your quotes - not your coffee!

Some of my students seem to ignore the importance of dissecting a quote to reveal its connotations and language craftwork. As a result, I've created this little gem to see if I could guide students on how to search for meanings independently.

Filter your quotes can be downloaded here!

 

Parent Meet - parents meet, discuss and share!

I want to share with you a successful Parent Meet event that I organised on the behalf of our English department. I invited a selected number of students and their parents to the event based on KS3 English data and teacher feedback.

It's not parents evening as parents were encouraged to discuss with other parents their own strategies for developing their child's learning. The parents also completed English writing and reading games alongside their children to send the message that learning English is fun!

Takeaway:
Parents were given a question and answer booklet, that I created, in order to teach their children key terms for English. You can download a copy for yourself here! The booklet has a series of subject based questions (alongside their answers) for parents to ask their children on a weekly basis. After a term, I can already see the positive impact it is having on our selected KS3 students' progress in English.

Go for it! Set up a parent meet event at your school and see how it goes!

 

AQA English Language and Literature B PLCs for questions 1 and 2

PLCs (also known as personal learning checklists) have proven to be an essential tool in improving my KS5 students' understanding of their own targets and areas of strength. The PLCs below strive to give each student an idea of which band they're on whilst clearly signposting their next D.I.R.T targets.

Question 1 Students simply highlight what they forgot to do by looking at the band above the one they achieved.

Question 2 PLC Students tick each skill according to the band they feel it is at. This enables students to oversee their overall band and to identify which skills they need to develop in order to achieve their highest band potential.

Literacy peer-assessment checklist

Here's an example of a literacy peer-assessment sheet I developed in order to increase my students' consideration of their literacy skills. I will improve this sheet by linking it to our department's literacy marking codes and by providing a literacy 'cheat sheet' (a literacy map at the back of the sheet) in order to assist the peer assessor with the assessment of their classmate's literacy skills.

#markingdirt

Dirt stands for:

• Directed/dedicated 
• Improvement/Independent
• Reflection 
• Time

We very much value our students completing their D.I.R.T work (as a result of good marking).

However,there's another area we could improve on:

The marking of our students' D.I.R.T responses.

 I believe that it's important to promote student self-reflection and peer assessment as it goes along with the cherished motto of: brain, book, buddy and boss.

As a result, I've created a D.I.R.T marking sticker/hand-out for my students. It's still in its draft stage and I intend to gather feedback on how best to adapt it for my students' learning.

It's a D.I.R.T Check up:

It encourages the student to evaluate their D.I.R.T effort and level of understanding for the D.I.R.T task as some students don't actually understand what the D.I.R.T task is or how completion of the DIRT would develop their learning. By ensuring that the students are able to answer the why questions (what's the point of completing this D.I.R.T task?) we're one step closer towards a higher standard of progress.

Feel free to download your own copy, of the D.I.R.T check up, here!

 

Twitter treats!

I've adapted the following resources thanks to ideas from the following Twitter people: @HeadofEnglish, @ACCooke5 (Mega Hexagons) and @globalsolo:

Mrs C Spalding's starter idea worked a treat with all of my Key Stage classes. I adapted it so that it became a main task rather than a starter. See my version here! It promoted discussions and my students were supporting each other as I wanted them to answer different discussion questions about the same text. They filled in the blanks for their own essay question and a variety of insightful answers were appearing across the classroom.

 

 

Mega Hexagons:

 

 

 

They're a great way of engaging students with the idea of higher level thinking - visually. Each layer has a different focus. Here's a simple version of the Mega Hexagon. The inner layer focuses on the main character and the outer layers encourage the student to identify, describe and to explain a particular literary feature.

With language analysis in mind: I've adapted this fantastic idea here!

I will continue to incorporate Solo thinking skills and tie it in with DIRT time for PEARL paragraphs.

My classroom's extension tasks wall, stuck wall and peer/self assessment sheets! Promoting independence!