I still feel that as KS3 Coordinator, my main concern is creativity, enjoyment, and pleasure in the subject as well as technical accuracy.’ Sarah has invested in helping pupils
CASE STUDY: CHALLENGING GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE
With the new standards leaving many teachers confused, Sarah Fisher, KS3 Literacy Coordinator at Sidmouth College in Devon, approached improving her students’ understanding by first challenging her own knowledge. ‘I’ve been working with the Exeter Writing Project at Exeter University, looking at the different ways we teach grammar and the language of grammar. One of the interesting things that we’ve done is to look at the gaps in our own knowledge. Even the three principle people who are running the project – considered experts – struggle sometimes!’ But, she says that the changes
haven’t affected her students as much as primary school pupils. ‘The GCSE curriculum hasn’t changed too dramatically and we also have five years to make sure they’re enjoying their reading and writing, and playing around with language while we’re layering and layering, looking at verbs, clauses, adverbs, prepositions, noun phrases, all those things. And we can revisit them. What’s changed is that we’re introducing it much more explicitly than before, with a focus half-termly on different aspects. What we’re not doing is changing everything as a knee-jerk reaction, or teaching grammar as an standalone subject.
with the new standards. ‘I’m quite hot on resources for grammar. I’m keen on the Pocket Poster books by Day Dream Education (
daydreameducation.co.uk). The new GCSE resources are much more fit for purpose, and we’re all going to have the posters up in our classrooms with a display about verbs, as that is something that children really struggle with. But we update resources frequently, so this is something we would have been doing anyway.’ She is also calling for help from
parents and carers. ‘I’ve put a large number of SPaG resources on our school website and we’re directing parents and students to it more and more. When students know they have an area of weakness we expect them not just to rely on lessons, but to look with their parents for what they can do themselves.’
CASE STUDY: INVESTING IN NEW RESOURCES
Madley Primary School, a rural one- form entry school near Hereford, faced the dual problems of introducing the new SPaG teaching while responding to an Ofsted report that called for more opportunities for creative writing. Literacy Coordinator and Year 5
Teacher, Helen Morris explains, ‘We don’t tend to use worksheets. If I’m doing a grammar exercise and want pupils to use apostrophes I would put something on the board that’s linked to our theme.’ Spelling is an exception though. ‘We’re now sending home spelling lists and testing in class. They’re out of context and there are words that children of that age don’t need to know and will never use, but we try to choose the most relevant.’ The school has had to invest in
resources to improve standards. ‘We’ve bought into CGP schemes (
cgpbooks.co.uk) for reading assessments and comprehension because everything’s different. In terms of grammar we’re using a combination of what we already have, some online resources from websites
like Twinkl, and have purchased CGP SAT Buster revision books to go home with Year 6 children.’ ‘To maintain creativity, we do a
weekly short-burst writing activity across the whole school, inspired by a prompt – usually a picture. Pupils write for 20 minutes then self mark. The aim is to keep the love of writing alive, but because of SPaG requirements we tend to intervene a little bit more now. We also do a lot of writing based around a theme that the children choose themselves, often linked to their current experiences, for example they recently wrote a letter about the price of milk in supermarkets, which affects our children because many of their parents are dairy farmers.’ Off-site trips and visitors to the
school are very important. ‘If we want to write about the woods we go to the woods. Last year I took pupils to a forest school and we gathered things that fairies might have left behind and then wrote fairy stories, and they adored it! We’ve also had two authors visit us in the last 12 months and that’s
where the children’s real flair comes in; when they’re truly inspired.’ Trips are paid for using school
funds, but parents are also asked to contribute, and the school is good at accessing grants. ‘We’ve never charged more than £10 for a trip, except when we went on an overnight trip to London. We visited the House of Commons because we had been learning about government, and th e Science Museum because our theme was space, then on to the National Gallery for art. We secured grants from the Institute of Physics, The House of Commons, and a local Foundation.’
SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE!
Need to purchase new resources to inspire students and raise standards in English? FundEd members can access our database of grants and read subject-specific income generation ideas. Go to
funded.org.uk for more details.
18 SPRING 2017 FundEd
IMAGES: CAROL ROGERSON; CASE STUDIES COURTESY OF LUBNA KHAN AND SARAH FISHER
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60