All the small things
As a trainee teacher, It was always my goal to achieve big things. I wanted to unlock potential in every individual I taught, making each lesson a smorgasbord of magical moments. My students were going...
View ArticleMarking: Experiments and Adventures.
Marking has a certain quality about it, whereby however much you do, there always seems to be some left. For me, it’s a project never finished. There’s always another set of books, a few scraps of...
View ArticleWhat’s the best way to teach vocabulary?
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that being able to read, understand and write words is incredibly important to every child’s education. It might even be so plainly obvious as to not merit...
View ArticleJohn the Reader
Like many other English teachers, I spend a lot of time thinking about what texts I should study with my classes. All English teachers, I believe, care deeply about their students’ reading, and are...
View ArticleRisking it with Rhetoric Part Two: Designed to be Spoken
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my experimentation with teaching rhetoric. The process marked a departure from what I had taught in previous years. My main justification for this was that if my...
View ArticleMy day at PedagooSW
I was delighted when Pedagoo SW was announced to be coming to Bristol. Aside from a 3 year interlude at University, which is all a little bit of a blur, I’ve lived in and around Bristol my whole life...
View ArticleGrammar Lessons for Descriptive Writing
As much as I love marking, it can be one the quickest and most efficient ways to make me feel like a failure. This sensation struck me in spades last term after I marked my classes’ efforts at...
View ArticleIgnite the Thesaurus! Synonymy in the classroom.
I don’t wish to start off the blog-post by sounding too boastful. But, and I’m sure you’ll be jealous to learn this, I have a full set of thesauruses in my classroom. Yep, that’s right. While most...
View ArticleExplicit Grammar: Teaching Relative Clauses
I’ve been experimenting this year with different ways of making the mechanics of writing a little more explicit to my students. My hope is that the more grammar knowledge my students have, the more...
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