The
kind people at Twinkl have given me a free account on their website and, in
return, I said I’d review, occasionally, some of their resources.
This
month’s finds are:
Gothic
Fiction
As
the dust settles on the new GCSEs, it gives us chance to look more at KS3. One
of the hard things at the moment is deciding and finding texts. If you are like
me, you have jettisoned ‘Holes’ already and are looking at what to fill that hole with something in the curriculum. One of the things I like about Twinkl is their extracts
from texts to support teaching.
I
was looking at building up our ‘Gothic Fiction’ unit and I thought I’d have a
look and, aside from the usual extracts from ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’, I
discovered some nice extracts from ‘Carmilla’, ‘Northanger Abbey’, ‘The Picture
of Dorian Gray’ and others. In addition to this, I came across ‘The
Oval Portrait’ by Edgar Allen Poe and ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ by Thomas Parnell in
their units on gothic fiction. There’s also a travel writing unit of work which
covers some nice extracts from Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.
One
of the challenges we have in teaching is time. We never get the time to find
new texts, so we stick to the old faithful ones. This year I am aiming to push
and try new texts: bring something new to the students’ plates. That's why it is always nice to fine a new one.
Debate
It’s sad to say that spoken language
has been elbowed out of the curriculum. One of our big changes this year is to
squeeze more of it in to the curriculum and find a way where it supports the
learning without it feeling superfluous or being unneeded. The GCSE Paper 2
writing sections has really highlighted a need for students to articulate one
clear opinion and communicate that opinion with skill. That’s why we are using
a debate a term with each class in KS3. We will give them time to prepare, time
to rehearse and then the actual debate. The debate packs on Twinkl are a good
starting point.
Sentences posters
I am not a big fan of display as I find them distracting for
students, teachers and SLT – say, when was the last time you changed that
display? I like the focus to be on the
front of the classroom and not on some shiny piece of card on the ceiling. The
sentence posters present a nice opportunity. They give students an example to
model their writing on. My plan is to have them reduced to A5 and laminated.
Students then will have to opportunity to pick them up, if they want to revise
how to use them.
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