In a few weeks at our Key Strategies For Improving Writing workshop, we’ll be at it again: emphasising the need for explicit instruction coupled with frequent, guided writing practice. One of the strategies we’ll be discussing is sentence grids – a three by three grid which distils different sentence types students can use in their…
How often have one of these happened to you at the start of your lessons? Students are talkative, loud and not focused Students are silent and passive Students stare at you and wait for you to get the lesson started Students have their books closed, pencil cases zipped up and are staring at you Students…
Coming up in a few weeks we’ll be running our annual Year 10 English Day. Unlike our Year 9 English Day, where we’ll be focusing on how to make the curriculum relevant and rigorous by centering it around critical literacy, our Year 10 Day will look at how to build the independence of our students…
Developing skills for analysing argument are important for success in VCE, but the reality is, few teenagers read traditional news platforms. However, the skills used for analysing argument can be easily transferred to more relevant (for students) and engaging websites, rather than being used only in traditional media. Since most teenagers are deeply engaged with…
Next week we’ll be running our B+ to A+ Senior English workshop and discussing practical strategies for improving student writing. One of the basic strategies we’ll be discussing is surface level vs. deeper level analysis. In their essays, students most often say only one thing about any piece of evidence they insert into an essay.…
Coming up over the next few months we have a number of workshops where we’ll be looking at reading strategies: How to teach students to do truly amazing writing in response to Romeo and Juliet VCE English text planning for 2018: An introduction to the Year 12 text list and a guide to choosing Year…
Last week we blogged about our new Romeo and Juliet textbook and how it scaffolds students to read and actually understand the play at a language level, not just a plot level. Apart from its usefulness as a reading resource, our Romeo and Juliet textbook also guides students through how to write on the play.…
At the moment at Ticking Mind we’re working on a student edition of Romeo and Juliet called: Shakespeare’s Tragedy Romeo and Juliet and How To Write A Truly Impressive Essay On It. You can see the cover here: Like our other student textbooks, this one seeks to explicitly break down skills for students and scaffold…
In the lead up to our workshop on compare and contrast essay writing (see the details here: https://www.tickingmind.com.au/event/teach-compare-contrast-essay-writing-years-10-11-northcote/) we’ve got some more ideas to share about practising complex comparative writing. In our last blog, we spoke about the need for students to make frequent connections between texts. In this post, we want to extend that…
Here in Victoria we’re in the early stages of teaching comparative text response writing at a senior level. What was clear from last year’s exam, is that we still have a long way to travel in our journey to teach students to write with sophistication in this text type. Perhaps the biggest defect in student…