Quick Cross-Curricular Ideas.

We have now hit the first weekend of the term, hooray! This first week back I have been given a couple of ideas from more experienced teachers that I have given a go and they have been rather successful. Time to share!

1) An AFL favourite. As a mini plenary/consolidation activity get your students to swap their books with a partner and write a set of “how to” instructions in it. For example, my bottom set year 7s were writing headlines today and they wrote an explanation of what makes a good headline in their partner’s book. It took a bit of explaining for them to grasp the concept of writing in someone else’s book but it was pretty successful once they understood.

2) I was finding that during form time there could be a lull where I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to be productive and not give the students a chance to get bored and start messing around. Someone suggested putting the news on. I have started doing it and the kids love it. It gives them knowledge of current affairs and stimulates discussion in my vertical tutor group.

If you have any titbits, feel free to share!

Poetry Ideas

This coming term, i.e. Tuesday, I will be starting the current AQA Literature poetry with my Y11s. We are doing Heaney and Clarke which I haven’t taught before and I’m not feeling overly confident about. So, I’m going to start with wordle. If you haven’t used it before check it out: www.wordle.net. Basically you type (or copy and paste) a text/poem/whatever into a box and press go. It creates a word cloud which you can format in various ways; colour, size, direction of words, font etc. The words are made bigger depending upon their frequency in the text. It’s a great starting point for a poem before your students read it, try getting them to make predictions of what the themes/plot might be. I’m going to use it to try and get a fresh perspective on the poems, see if something new crops up from removing the form of the poem and just looking at the words.

Here is one I made using 2 poems: Mid-Term Break and On My First Sonne.

 

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