Often in class, we give students vocabulary lists with nouns or adjectives to help them develop the detail in their writing. However, one of the easiest ways for students to add detail to their writing is to use prepositions instead. This activity helps students practise using prepositions to create more interesting sentences. How to use…
If we give students a a reading piece and ask them to answer five comprehension questions about it, then we’re essentially assessing their reading skills. Yes, it’s a practice task in that they’re practising comprehension skills, but it’s not an effective learning task because we’re not teaching them to use or be mindful of inference…
If you’ve never heard of Doug Lemov or his impressive Teach Like A Champion book then it’s well worth checking out. Lemov codifies and explains a series of no frills teaching procedures and practices that we can use in every classroom to improve our practice. He’s one of the influences for the current craze about…
We can spend a lot of time when we teach analytic and persuasive writing in teaching paragraph structure. You’ve all heard of one of these and will probably have your own variations: TEE – topic sentence, evidence, explanation TEEL – topic sentence,evidence, explanation, link PEE – point, evidence, explanation But how do we approach teaching…
Yep, soon it’ll be NAPLAN again and your students may have to write a creative piece. Routine writing practice has enormous benefits in the English classroom and one of the things you can do in the lead up to NAPLAN is to get your students to crank out a story a week. Each time they…
If practice is the key to improving literacy skills, English teaching is often an excercise in finding different ways to do the same thing: practising reading, writing and speaking. Certainly at Ticking Mind we think of our mission as one of giving teachers a range of strategies to implement explicit writing instruction and practice. Here’s…
Grease is no longer the word. It’s now the rather more long winded High Impact Teaching Strategies or Evidence Based Strategies. Because we’re suckers for educational trends at Ticking Mind, we’ll be talking HITs and EBRs at our annual round of English Graduate Days (Northcote, Ringwood, Shepparton) starting next week. One evidence based strategy we’ll…
Next week we’ll be running our annual Crash Course In History for history teaching newbies (whether they’re fresh out of uni, or experienced teachers teaching history for the first time). Because we’ll be discussing a three step lesson plan which replicates what happens in an effective text response unit, we thought we’d share this simple…
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…