“Extraordinary”

Extraordinary, the way you make me feel
I’m so very glad it’s real

Prince – Extraordinary – One Nite Alone

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One of the main reasons I love twitter so much is the sharing of good practise, ideas, resources etc. Some ideas are quite extraordinary!

These are some resources/ideas (resources at the end) that I have used successfully in my lessons:

1 Top Trumps

I would often see Teacher Further Maths  @TeachFMaths tweet out top trumps, so couple years ago I made a mock-up for Of Mice and Men and it was brilliant. Since then I’ve done with Blood Brothers and Lord of the Flies. Basically you can do it with any literature character/theme you want. So far it’s been a success in all lessons I’ve used it.

2 Selfie

@MathedUp tweeted out the image above to ‘request a selfie’. I stuck the image up on my whiteboard and KS3 love it. They draw the symbol in their books, when I mark I take a photo and email home. It’s simple, cheap and a positive step forward.

3 Analyse an essay Box

@MartynReah tweeted out a resource to analyse an essay (I think originally student’s own work) I adapted and stuck some text from Of Mice and Men and students had to delete all unnecessary words leaving only essentials to analyse. Another fantastic lesson – the analysis was better than they’d usually come up with.

4 Character fingerprint

It’s difficult to remember where I saw this originally but I think it was @misslollyhill. Again a cheap and different way of analysing text. Students make up a character’s fingerprint with quotes. I’ve done this lesson with nearly every book I’ve taught since.

5 Wiki Page

@JamieClark85 Tweeted out these amazing Wikipages. I asked if he’d mind if I made up my own. Again, I’ve used these now with all the main texts that I teach… usually for homework or at the start of a unit and often to research ‘context’. Students like this: I think they like the familiarity.

6 Text message Questions

I stumbled across ‘fake text message’ I think on my Facebook page and it gave me the idea. You can google fake text msg and lots come up (Instagram, snap-chat etc).  I made up a John Steinbeck set of questions, students stuck on left of book and wrote answers to the right. Again this works well, students seem to like working on familiar territory. As you can see from image above (difference between argue and persuade) I’ve used for different types of questions.

7 Post it note – quote analysis

This is fairly straight forward I get students to write quotes on post-it-note pads then stick to colour paper and next to their quote, they analyse in detail. There’s nothing really special about this other than students like post-it-notes and it just prevents analysing language from getting stale.  I believe these post-its came from Wilkos.

8 Black/white line mind map images

A few years ago I wanted to compare Steinbeck’s opening pages to the initial description of the ranch. I googled line drawings and found the ones on the right image. Students glued in. I project the same image on the whiteboard and in a think/pair/share style lesson we annotate together. Because it worked so well I’ve gone on to use with individual characters or comparison of characters. Again, students like this, their mind-maps are annotated to a higher standard and their books look neater. Win-win.

9 Foldables

I’ve used foldables for a long time in lessons. It’s just another way of analysing a quote. The idea is on the front students write a characteristic, inside the first flap they write a quote that supports their idea and in the inside middle they pick out key words to analyse. Again they seem to like this.

10 Visualiser

I love my visualiser. I use it a lot when showing/teaching students how to peer assess. Not any of the ‘be kind’ ‘be helpful’ kind of things (sorry)!

I ask how can we move this up another band. I usually get comments like, add a comma etc I know it’s harsh but I remind them adding a comma will not help them move up a band, so on the whiteboard I show them how to improve the answer. Then I get them to swap books and peer assess somebody else’s work. I don’t think I’ve cracked the whole peer assessing thing yet, but this works and you can quickly snapshot a student’s work then give them their book back. I like it and use it a lot.

 

You can download some resources here:

1. Top Trumps  Top trumps Lord of Flies
2. Selfie (sorry not mine to give away, but I’m sure if you tweet creator they won’t mind)
3. Analyse an essay  Analyse your own essay
4. Character fingerprint (no resource)
5. Wiki Page  wiki page
6. Text message Questions  OMAM text message questions
7. Post it note – quote analysis (no resource)
8. Black/white line mind map images  OMNM silhouettes
9. Foldables (no resource)
10. Visualiser (no resource)