Retrieval, retrieval, retrieval

Today I’ve been reading Kate Jones’ (@87history) book, Retrieval Practice, and it lead me to Thinking and Linking Grids, and then to Stuart Pryke’s (SPryke2) Thinking and Linking Grid for A Christmas Carol. I immediately loved the idea and wanted to jump on the bandwagon and make some more to go with the texts we’ll be teaching at my new school! So here they are – if you don’t have dice / can’t be bothered to source dice / don’t want to spend all break trying to find missing dice / suddenly realise that dice might be a vector for covid, then you can use virtual dice here: https://www.random.org/dice/

Here is a link to @spryke2’s A Christmas Carol tweet

Looking forward to trialing the ‘Thinking and Linking’ grid concept from @87History’s ‘Love to Teach’. Here’s a draft for one I made on ‘A Christmas Carol’ at GCSE and currently making one for ‘Animal Farm’ to try with KS3! @Team_English1 pic.twitter.com/HVFVBAkgNF

— Stuart Pryke (@SPryke2) October 23, 2019

And here are the three I made. Hope they’re useful!

romeo-and-juliet-thinking-and-linking-grid-1-2Downloa

an-inspector-calls-thinking-and-linking-grid-1-3Download

blood-brothers-thinking-and-linking-grid-1-3Download

Blood Brothers – Display

I’m starting a new job in September and our KS4 texts are different to those I’ve taught for the last four years, so I’ve been busy getting resources together as and when I can. I was struggling to find any Blood Brothers display material, so I’ve created some myself. Please help yourself to them – just click on the image to download. I’ll add more bits and pieces as I make them.

Flash – ahh ahh!

I’m not sure these will be the saviour of anyone, let alone the universe, but they may prove useful to you at some point in the future. I spent quite a bit of time on Adobe Spark making these, as I like things nice and neat. Simply, they are the fronts of some themed flashcards for Macbeth and Jekyll & Hyde.

Print them off, guillotine them and hey presto – flashcards that students can add quotations / information / page references etc.

Macbeth Triple Quote Flashcards

Jekyll and Hyde FlashcardsJ&H Flashcards

Words, words, words

Been a bit busy over the last few days, so haven’t had a chance to add anything to the blog – here are some quick resources to use with English Literature students. I cannot claim any credit for them as they came from Andy Tharby ( @andytharby ) and his fantastic book, Making Every English Lesson Count, but I have adapted them to be specific to the following texts: An Inspector Calls, Jekyll and Hyde, and Macbeth. I hope they are useful.

Analytical sentence stems Jekyll and Hyde

Analytical sentence stems Macbeth

Analytical sentence stems An Inspector Calls

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace…

Just countin’ the days…

That’s how I’m feeling today. My Year 11s are just starting to ‘get it’, which is lovely. My Year 10s are pretty much on fire, or smouldering at least. And there’s lots of other exciting things happening for me at the moment, but I’m just a bit ‘meh’. Think it’s pre-exam feaver to be fair.

To counteract this gloomy-goosery, here is one of my favourite revision resources (found on Twitter via a brilliant geography teacher) that I’ve adapted for An Inspector Calls.
It can be used in lessons, for homework or revision. It’s quite simple, but so effective.

UPDATE: I’ve also added a Jekyll and Hyde clock – hope it’s useful!

Download here:

An Inspector Calls Quotes Revision Clock

Jekyll and Hyde Chapters Clock

 

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

What do you call them?

Actual footage of me creating model answers

Models? Model answers? WAGOLLs? WILFs? One I made earlier? I’ll write it along with you? Well, whatever it is, having a great answer to show students is really powerful – I’m increasingly loving writing along with them – particularly in this time-poor exam landscape. I like to show them what is possible. I use a visualiser sometimes. Sometimes I type. It depends on the class. So, I’ve accrued a few model answers (think that’s what I’m going for) and append some below – if they’re useful (might save you a bit of time), please help yourself.

Edexcel English Literature GCSE Model Answers (Papers  1 and 2)

Edexcel English Literature Jekyll and Hyde Chapter 2 Extract Question Model Answer

Edexcel English Literature Macbeth Conflict Model Answer Paper 1

Edexcel English Literature AIC Generations model answer

Edexcel English Literature Danger Whole Text J and H response

Edexcel English Language GCSE Model Answers (Papers  1 and 2)

Edexcel English Language Evaluate The Willows Example Answer

Edexcel English Language Paper 2 Hiroshima Evaluate Model Answer

 

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

My first blog post – “Trying to be bold”

Giacinto Gimignani – An Angel and a Devil Fighting for the Soul of a Child

So, this is my first ever blog post as an English teacher. I’ve had so much benefit from the work of others, I wanted to share some of the stuff I do too – in the hopes that it might help someone else out along the way.

It really came about from reading Twitter earlier on today. I was reading @Xris32’s brilliant blog: Learning from my mistakes and his blog post about Language Paper 2 ‘hacks’ and it prompted me to create a list of words that you could give students to use during their Paper 2 task – one group for positive language and the other for negative. So, here it is, and I hope it’s useful. It’s specifically linked to point 8 on Xris’s post.

Metaphorical words for Language Paper 2