Think about the key ideas in a text Reading or watching a set text for study is probably the most basic holiday homework task students get. Beyond merely familiarising themselves with the text though, something else essential that students need to achieve from an initial reading or viewing of a text is to begin to…
Finding mentor texts for creative writing is hard. Pieces can be too long, too hard or written in a way that isn’t an accessible model for students to learn from. That’s where Flash Fiction comes in. It’s not always ‘easy’ or accessible, but it certainly is short, usually engaging and often provides a model for…
Drafting should really be a process of evolving and changing writing, not simply ‘fixing’ spelling mistakes and punctuation. However, once students have written a first draft of anything, it can become a template that is set in stone. Any second or third draft they do can look incredibly like their original draft. A simple trick…
Since the new Craft of Writing area of study in VCE English encourages students to experiment with a range of writing types – such as reflective pieces, blogs, journal entries, feature articles, explainers and biographical writing to name a few – schools are now looking at how to teach a greater range of text types…
Our new VM Literacy Handbook 1 – for Vocational Major Literacy Units 1&2 – is filled with strategies to help students understand and write about community and workplace issues. While the content might be slightly different to what students do in VCE or junior English, there is significant overlap in terms of persuasive writing skills.…
Next year, the new VCE English study design will be implemented at Units 3 & 4. A big part of this will involve teaching the new Craft of Writing area of study and looking at mentor texts as a model for how students can write about an idea. Many of the mentor texts on the…
There are two reasons you might now consider teaching students how to write ‘explainers’ in junior English. Firstly, in the new VCE English study design, the craft of writing AOS includes ‘explain’ as one of the four purposes for which students can write. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, explainers are a more and more common…
Podcasts are both an ideal and difficult text type to teach for a non-fiction creative writing unit in a junior English classroom. Perfect, because the medium offers so many opportunities to create texts in different ways. But difficult, also, because podcasts can be long and there is so much diversity in genre and structure of…
In the English classroom, we tend to prioritise fiction – either reading it or analysing and writing about it. But this sort of writing represents only a fraction of the texts that we, and our students, are exposed to in the ‘real world’. Biographies, memoirs, recounts, podcasts, ads, documentaries, articles, opinion pieces, reviews, blogs, pamphlets,…
In the next few weeks we’ll be running workshops on the best strategies for teaching Units 1&3 English and Literature. In both workshops, we’ll be stressing the importance of vocabulary instruction and sharing a whole range of strategies to improve students’ lexicon. One of the resources we’ll be discussing in this context is web based…