Cause and effect analysis

We all know that analytic verbs are important in text response essays. We want students to analyse and discuss how an author, construction element or text as a whole demonstrates, highlights, reveals (and so on) meaning. While these types of verbs are important to teach, there is another set of equally important verbs in text…

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A few ideas for the last week of school

Vote on Macquarie dictionary’s word of the year Each year, Australia’s national dictionary – The Macquarie – votes on a new word of phrase that most captures the zeitgeist. There’s a bunch of contenders. You can go through a process where you: List all the words and first ask students to have a go defining…

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Three types of holiday homework tasks

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…

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Look, cover, re-write drafting

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…

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Reflective writing

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…

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Explainers

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…

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