Author Mentors: Ellen Van Neerven and Theme

This is Part 3 in a series on 'Author Mentors'. In a nutshell, these lessons are about using short extracts to scaffold student engagement; a way of backward mapping from the NSW Year 12 Craft of Writing module and the Year 11 Reading to Write module before that. 

After looking at context and structure, today's sample lesson moves into more conceptual territory - what an English teacher might traditionally call 'theme'. You will need a copy of Ellen Van Neerven's Young Adult anthology Heat and Light for the extract that forms the crux of these activities.

1. Extract. Start by reading a selected extract from Heat and Light as a class. The extract in question is from the first page of the short story 'Hot Stones'. It starts with 'Thirteen is the age that makes you,' and ends with 'Go easy. I have to see if we're related, first.'

Students then do a think-pair-share activity, discussing each of the following questions before responding in their books:

1. Tell me what you liked best about this extract.
2. Tell me about the main character in the extract.
3. Tell me how you would feel if you had been kicked out of English.
4. Tell me about the Grandmother.
5. Tell me why the main character is so interested in Mia. 

These are fairly straightforward questions designed to gauge comprehension and provoke a personal response. Comprehension is a key part of thematic engagement because the skill of summarising is the very core of what a 'theme' or 'concept' is. If a student is able to summarise something, then they are identifying the most significant aspects of the text. There is some degree of subjectivity in this, which is what we (the teachers) want because identifying or responding to a theme in a text is a highly subjective process. The more that a student is able to take a firm and individual position, the more they will find success in crafting a thesis for an extended response. 

In some Gifted and Talented/High Potential and Gifted Education circles, summarising leads to the higher order skill of abstraction; the ability to think of things in terms of concepts rather than plot points. 

2. Connecting. Once students have begun grappling with the text at a surface comprehension level (and perhaps deeper), move on to looking at the connections that can be made with the text. Again, this should be a subjective experience for each student. It doesn't matter how an outsider may judge the 'quality' of the student's answers, what's important is said student's ability to create their own connections when reading. The process of generating ideas of how to connect the text to other things is an entire step on its own before we look at guiding students in calling upon more judicious examples. Some students may struggle to make what the teacher sees as an effective connection, but this is why we look at doing this in Stage 5 or earlier... it's part of that backward mapping process that fosters skills needed for Year 11 and 12.

Anyway, ask students to connect: 

1. To Self - What is something you have in common with or something that makes you different from Colin?
2. To Text - What is a similarity that this extract shares with another text?
3. To World - What is something from the wider world or history that you can relate to this extract?

3. Considering Theme. Now we're ready for the final part of the activity. After thinking about the text in a few different ways, students are then asked to reflect and develop on their ideas. This starts with a prompt to concentrate the extract into a single-word abstraction. Students are then asked to develop this into a statement of theme, which is essentially a scaffolded way of getting students to develop a mini-thesis, or a conceptual understanding of the extract. Concept, idea, abstraction, or theme - it doesn't matter what you call it, it all supports the process of writing an essay.

1. If you had to summarise this extract as being about something in a single word, what would it be?
2. What opinion do you think the author might have about the single word you just wrote?
3. What do you think the extract is saying about this word?
4. You've now developed a thematic understanding of the extract. Find three quotes that support this theme.
5. Explain exactly how each quote supports your thematic understanding.

It is entirely possible to take this further by delving into structural territory and looking at techniques used, etc., but I would personally keep the focus tightly on theme. This reinforces the cognitive purity of the lesson in teaching one key thing. 

The above lesson can be found as a PowerPoint here. 

Acknowledgment: The following material has been adapted and modified specifically for this blog. I would like to acknowledge some of my colleagues - Ashleigh Galea, Lauren Hage, Amra Winter - who helped develop some additional material not included here.

Peace Train Comprehension - Remote Learning, 2021

Hello fellow NSW teachers, looks like we're back in lockdown and steering the remote learning train once again! What can one say?

Here's an activity I used with a mixed ability Year 8 class last year. It isn't complicated or revolutionary in any way, just a cute clip I found on Youtube for Cat Stevens' timeless song Peace Train. The worksheet I made is fairly straightforward and focuses on comprehension of the lyrics - I wanted something simple and not too difficult so the class could ease into remote learning. Getting as many students engaged as possible so that they stay in a calm routine, well, it's the name of the game at this point.

This is how it goes...

Step 1: Students watch the following clip:

This can also be seen here. I would recommend using some kind of Youtube downloader site (provided you have good antivirus software) so you can download your own copy. Having a downloaded copy usually leads to less problems than trying to access wifi - even (or especially) when teaching a full classroom as per normal routine.

Step 2: Students respond to questions on the worksheet. This can be uploaded as a .doc to a Google Classroom so students can just type into the boxes, or printed off as a worksheet if needed.

• Worksheet (Word version)
• Worksheet (PDF)

A lot of my students hadn't heard the song before and they enjoyed it, which is always a fun bonus. It was nice to have a lesson focused on something positive so students could disconnect a little bit from the negativity of the pandemic.

Anyway, that's all for today, like I said - it's a fairly straightforward worksheet. 

I hope your remote learning experiences this time around are as smooth and stress-free as possible!

Take care.

Introducing Year 7 to the Concept of Literature

While teaching, I find myself coming back to English over and over again and thinking about what the discipline is and why we teach it. Looking at the NSW syllabus document and examining the content points becomes useful because I can use it to reframe how I approach things. It gives me ideas about other 'ways into' the subject. If I get stuck while programming a unit of work I'll keep bouncing back to the outcomes and looking at the content points, which contain loads of ideas embedded in them. This also seems to be one of the most effective pieces of advice to give pre-service and beginner English teachers who find themselves stuck for ideas when lesson planning. 

On top of this, we also have the English Textual Concepts, which act as a synthesis of the major ideas and methods that have come to exemplify English. These can be incredibly useful when designing an overall unit of work but also have merit when looking at singular lesson activities.

When moving from Primary to Secondary school, students will need to be introduced to English in a new way - a more developed way that will hopefully sustain their growth as critical thinkers and challenge them by placing them in that 'zone of proximal development'. I've been thinking about this and how it can be scaffolded for students with varying degrees of literacy and other additional learning needs. How, for example, can the concept of Literary Value be introduced to Year 7, assuming that this terminology has not yet been mentioned to them in a Stage 3 context?

I think the first step is to break down what 'Literary Value' means in wording that the average Year 7 student will understand. Part of this is reframing the concept in a way that has authentic meaning in a wider context, so I'll swap out 'Literary Value' here for 'Literature'. When I used to work in a bookstore, the term 'Literature' was recognisable as a term with its own connotations separate from 'General Fiction' - a distinction that also extends into the realms of literary criticism, publishing, marketing, and popular review categories in newspapers, magazines, websites, etc. Using this idea along with the English Textual Concepts descriptor for Stage 4-level Literary Value, we can arrive at a workable definition that looks like this:

Literature: Fictional written works, especially those considered to be of superior or lasting artistic merit.

Activity 1: The first step is to place this definition in the centre of a board. Rather than do a mindmap or brainstorm, the teacher should lead a discussion on what each constituent part of the definition means and annotate it. Students should copy the definition into their book first and then add the annotations as you go. This serves a dual purpose - it scaffolds and models the process of determining meaning, and it also teaches the skill of annotating which will become more useful to students as they get older and begin to interact with more demanding texts.

The parts you will need to discuss with students and annotate are as follows:

• What does 'fictional' mean?
• What does 'superior' mean? Who decides what is superior?
• What does 'artistic merit' mean?
• What does 'lasting' mean?
• Note also that 'especially' leaves the process open-ended - what one person determines to be 'literature' may be subjective.

Activity 2: Students can then be given a worksheet with six examples of written works, ones that they will hopefully recognise or for which they will at least understand the context. The worksheet scaffolds the process of determining what 'counts' as literature. You may need to read aloud some of the fine print on the book examples as they probably won't be large enough on a printout for students to see. You should also project it on the board so they can see it in colour (assuming your photocopy of the worksheet is in black and white). 

Focus the conversations around things like:

• The age of the book (IE. Is the book 'lasting' in that we still know about it after all this time?)
• Prizes the book has won ('Pulitzer Prize', 'Australian Children's Book of the Year')
• Is the book fiction or non-fiction?
• The last example, Wonder, will be interesting because a lot of students read it in Primary school. In their eyes, this will make it a 'classic' of sorts. This could lead to interesting discussions on whether it may one day be considered a classic in the future and therefore have lasting artistic merit. 

Activity 3: As always, try to get your students writing independently for a bit. Tell them to pick one literary text from the worksheet and write a few sentences explaining why they think it continues to have impact after such a long time (or will continue having impact into the future). 

You can find the worksheet here - Literature. 

Guided Storywriting

Hi, how's it going?

I hope you're well, and I really do mean that - this has been a tough year for everyone and being a teacher in the public system looks like it might only become more challenging as we move into 2021. I've long been a big believer in free education for all but I know how hard it is not to feel demoralised and disillusioned sometimes when working within this system. What's that adage... nothing worth doing was ever easy? 

Teaching isn't easy. 

So, fellow teachers, I hope you're all kind on yourselves as we move into Term 4 of 2020. I hope I can be kind on myself too! Today I thought I'd share a stand-alone worksheet that worked well with my mixed-ability Year 8 classes in that nebulous part of the year where we were all trying to get students back on track after everyone isolated during NSW's first COVID wave. This lesson was designed to focus the students on building their literacy skills, and it bought me some time so I could continue planning some longer term work for my classes.

Guided Storywriting - Worksheet.

The first half of the lesson involves students filling in an open-ended cloze passage that comes with annotations that 'guide' the sort of answers that will work best. This is useful for students who aren't yet at the point where they can generate ideas in sufficient number, and helps them ascertain what categories of words work well in particular contexts.

The second half of the lesson contains some Super Six Strategies to extend student comprehension, and this includes visualisation, connection, and monitoring/summarising activities.

Have a nice term! :)

August Heat

Hello from Amber-land!

Below you'll find some resources that have been developed for a lesson that can be taught with Years 7-10 English. Normally I'd discuss the way the lesson works but today I'm going to take a different approach by reflecting a little on how the lesson went and how it was developed/delivered. I find it useful to blog about this process as putting it into words helps me crystallise how I teach. If you're already an experienced teacher just on the look-out for some resources then, by all means, feel free to skip down to the bit about the PowerPoint and activity sheet and disregard anything you already know :)

Preamble done.

Now, to start with, my friend and colleague Kira Bryant, who is also my Head Teacher, brought to the faculty's attention a great short story called 'August Heat' by William Fryer Harvey. Kira said it worked well with her Year 7 class, so I figured I'd give it to a go with three of my junior classes - two Year 8s and a Year 9 class.

(Incidentally, Kira has a really cool blog called Tales from an Edugeek that has a whole stack of stuff about English teachers who write.)

'August Heat' is suitable for our purposes for a number of reasons:

• It isn't too short and it isn't too long - just the right length for the 'mainstream' in a junior classroom (that zone of proximal development that we all love so much!)
• It was published in 1910, which makes it 110 years old, and therefore public domain. As it's not subject to copyright laws there's therefore no legal problem photocopying or printing it for the classroom.
• The style of writing isn't too inaccessible for today's teenagers. The prose is straightforward but not without a certain poetry, and Fryer Harvey's craft as a storyteller should grab the attention for at least a suitable portion of the class.
  
• The content could be described as 'horror' or, at least, in the realms of the mysterious and supernatural. Kira describes it as having an ending with "just the right amount of ambiguity to challenge our students". In any case, the story isn't too inappropriate for young adolescents, and it has an effective sense of dread and mystery that builds in detail until the wonderfully enigmatic ending.
  

So, as I was saying, I decided to use it with three classes.

The lesson itself was designed to be relatively direct. Getting students back into seats in a shared classroom has been, to put it lightly, a bit of a challenge after the disruptions caused by COVID-19 over the last three months. I initially attempted to do a class novel when each of my junior classes returned but that didn't really work out the way that I'd hoped. Each student was moving from separate, individualised online learning to working in a single room with the same novel, ostensibly learning at the same pace. I tried this with my four junior classes (two Year 9s, two Year 8s) and this approach is only really working with one of them so I had to abandon it for the other three classes.

Side-note: Don't be afraid to abandon a lesson that just isn't working. Adapting to the needs of a classroom is paramount to both their sanity and yours. I learned this very early on in my career. Sure, it can be depressing to see a beautifully-designed lesson just completely clunk in the face of disengaged students, but learning how to deal with this is preferable to taking it personally. When this happens to me, and it still happens even now because I like to keep trying different things, then I tend to take two approaches:

1. Recognise where exactly the lesson went wrong and learn from this.
   
2. Use the remaining time of the 'lost' lesson to work individually with students who are still engaged and/or build rapport by talking to the disengaged about why the lesson isn't working for them. If it's a case that the student is 'acting out' then, more times than not, it could be because the work is too difficult for them. Their behaviour should still be dealt with in an appropriate manner (that's a blog for another day), however, the 'tipping point' where they lost the will to learn is invaluable information if you can pinpoint where, when, and why it happened. That, in itself, is informal assessment of student ability.

Anyway. I abandoned the novel study with my two Year 8 classes and my other Year 9 class. I decided that self-contained lessons with minimal whole-class instruction was the best way to go. I also wanted to have it student-centered so I could spend my time doing one on one instruction or 'crowd control' around the room, so I put all the activities onto a single double-sided sheet.

Here's the lesson:

1. Read through the short story with the class. This is presented in PPT form after I heard my colleague Blake speaking about how much more engaged students can be when reading through a screen. Something about smartphone conditioning I guess! I broke the story up across slides with an image for each part of the story (except for one slide).
2. Students work through the six activities on the sheet. There are six of these to correspond with each of the Super 6 activities. I wanted to do something like this after blogging about the Super 6 a couple of weeks ago, so I split the sheet into two halves - the first half is for the students to do before and during activities (Predicting, Monitoring, Questioning), and the second half is for after (Visualising, Summarising, Connecting). I won't go into too much detail as the activities are deliberately self-explanatory to make it as student-directed as possible.
   

Reflecting: The actual lessons with each individual class all turned out very differently. I did the lesson three times across a Friday. Our school has a 5 period day, and I delivered the lesson for Year 8 Class A in Period 1, Year 8 Class B in Period 4, and Year 9 Class A in Period 5.

• Year 8 Class A: This went really well. The class was engaged for the entire short story and the majority of them finished the sheet. Some students struggled with certain parts of the sheet but I was able to simply flip the sheet over and let them pick an activity from the back - after listening to and watching 'August Heat' some students with additional learning needs were quite happy to express their learning visually or tell me stories of how it connected to other things.

• Year 8 Class B: Even though they're both Year 8, this class is really quite different to Class A as it contains a whole range of students with quite diverse learning needs. This class found it significantly more difficult to focus for the entirety of the story so I simply read up until the slide with no picture (this slide is needed to cover the visualisation activity) and told the class that was where it ended. The students who had no issues paying attention were still able to complete the sheet and came up with interesting ideas that demonstrated their comprehension. For the students who had struggled I was able to walk around to them, one by one, and explain whatever had confused them. The variety of activities on the sheet gave every student at least one entry point to show their comprehension. From this point on I just wandered the room, keeping students on task, clarifying information, and answering any questions students had.

• Year 9 Class A: As per the law of diminishing returns, Year 9 were even less engaged than Year 8 Class B. This was last period on a Friday, and the class came in off the back of lunchtime, so I guess they were all ready to go home! Usually this particular period starts with a cascade of groaning requests, like, "It's last period Friday sir, can we do something fun?" (My response of "This is English, it's always fun" is not usually well-received) or "Can we just have a chill lesson?" (Response: "Nah bro"). I made the quick decision to follow the same approach I used with Year 8 Class B, opting to cut the PPT short at the halfway mark. Sheet completion was probably around the 20-30% mark, with another 40% at least doing half of it, and the remaining 20-30% of the class still doing at least one activity after the reading portion. Not ideal, but better than the last Friday Period 5 I'd had with them.   

In hindsight, I've decided that the lesson works fairly well and I'm sure I'll use it again next year. That said, the inability of two of the classes to focus through the entire PPT while the story was read to them isn't what I had hoped for. I knew that some of the students in Year 8 Class B in particular would find it quite challenging so it wasn't a surprise, but these things still need to be tried.

For the next lesson I did an entirely self-contained sheet with no whole class instruction and no PPT/board work. I figured this would be a better work-around for students unable to focus on teacher-talk for any amount of time. This turned out to work even better but more on that in a future blog.

Focus on Reading and Super Six Strategies

I have to admit that I'm finding it difficult to think pedagogically at the moment. What I mean by that is that I'm usually trying to think and plan ahead into the next term or two. I always want to backward map as much as possible, to frontload students so that when they get to the tricky part of their learning they feel as prepared as possible. It also helps diminish my own anxiety and gives me a clear roadmap to work to - everything is transparent and students know exactly what's coming up throughout each term. Assessment tasks can be given to students far in advance of due dates, and it usually frees up my spare periods to concentrate on head teacher responsibilities, or welfare troubleshooting, helping students 1:1, or any other long projects I might be working on. 

In the age of COVID-19 it just feels impossible trying to plan for anything. Our goalposts are getting moved almost daily... and it isn't anyone's fault, it's just kind of how it is. Being able to plan far ahead has become a privilege rather than a necessity. 

I hate it.

Whenever I get stuck like this I tend to favour a back-to-basics approach. When times are complicated then the work should be simpler. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (pictured above) makes it pretty clear that students are less likely to be able to engage with curriculum if their basic needs aren't being met and, as this pandemic provokes and fertilises a seemingly neverending range of issues straight out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, I don't blame them. A lot of students are going to find it difficult to take complicated course content on board in order to "become the most that one can be" if they feel that their safety needs are being threatened by a pandemic.

I always come back to the Super Six Literacy strategies. 

Some time in the past, I think it might have been 2013 or 2014, my school undertook the Focus on Reading professional development modules. Others will be able to tell you about this literacy initiative more than me... what I will say instead is that this particular professional learning galvanised my appreciation for teaching literacy skills. The Focus on Reading modules just felt so wonderfully practical and I'm glad to see that the Department of Education is currently working on a new version of it.

I replicate some of the Super Six-related strategies below in the absence of their current availability. 

Here's an example, from Page 8 of Module 1, drawing upon Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency by I. Fountas and G. Pinnell (2006, pp.463-464). This demonstrates some ways in which students can practice independent writing in relation to their reading:

Writing and Drawing About Reading

Using words, phrases or sketches on stick-on notes or in the notebook to note:

• Place where you made a personal prediction
• Predictions
• Place where you found out something about a character
• Wonderings
• Place where you learned new information
• Place that you found confusing
• Place that you found interesting
• Memorable language
• Place that reminded you of another book

Short writing activities - a few sentences or paragraphs produced quickly in a notebook or a long stick-on note that is placed in a notebook:

• Reaction to the writer's style
• A prediction
• Response to a selected quote
• Response to a peer's thinking
• Reaction to a character
• Thoughts about the writer's craft
• Thoughts about the writer's message
• Comments on the writer's point of view
• Thoughts about how the text reveals life issues
• New understandings or insights
• Using knowledge of the genre to think about character, plot, theme, setting
• Links to other texts
• Story map

Graphic organisers - words, phrases, sketches, or sentences on graphic organisers or drawn in a notebook:

• Web
• Time sequence chain
• Comparison/contrast chart
• Cause/effect chart
• Problem/solution chart
• Grid for comparing elements or taking notes
• Outline
• Letter to the teacher with reply (ongoing dialogue about texts)

Longer responses in the notebook elaborating on thinking about one or several texts

• Double-column entry (two-column responses with material from the text, a category or questions on the left and response or comments on the right)
• Expansion of thinking from the notes, sketches, short writing, or graphic organisers
• Letter to author or illustrator study
• Book recommendation
• Book review 

Published work - more formal responses to texts that are shared publicly

• Poem related to a text
• Picture book on a topic or subject (EG. Biography)
• Opinion essay
• Report of an author or illustrator study
• Examination of a particular theme across texts
• A character analysis or companion
• A book critique  

This particular Focus on Reading module notes go on to discuss the interrelated nature of reading and writing - the way in which learning to write should take place alongside learning to read, as one strengthens the other and vice versa.

I came to realise in light of all this that the explicit teaching of reading and writing right up to the end of Year 12 it is a fundamental part of our ongoing ability to understand complex and sustained text. Indeed, even adults need to make these processes explicit to themselves if they are to develop their own critical faculties in relation to the wider world. Learning never stops.

Super Six Literacy Strategies

The strategies mentioned above can be categorised as examples of the Super Six - to be honest, all comprehension essentially fits into this paradigm. The Super Six, in brief, are the following:

Questioning: Learners formulate and respond to questions that clarify meaning. This allows for greater depth of understanding when drilling down into texts.

Visualising: Learners create a mental image from a text. Visualising isn't necessarily a natural skill for everyone and is something that needs to be developed so that imaginative skills are engaged.

Making Connections: Learners make personal connections with the text by linking it to themselves, another text, or the wider world. This process makes use of our ability to recall information from our broader understanding of things - building pathways between different kinds of knowledge and prompting development of our ability to synthesise information.

Monitoring: Learners interrupt the reading process by stopping to check their understanding. This is an important part of comprehension as it forces the learner to develop strategies to cope with obstacles or disrupted meaning during the reading process.

Summarising: Learners identify and gather together the most significant parts of a text, restating this information in their own words. This is another valuable part of the comprehension process as it helps develop our ability to synthesise information, sort and categorise ideas, and discard irrelevant details.

Predicting: Learners use information from one part of the text to construct an idea of what will happen later in the same text. This is a valuable part of our critical thinking in that it makes explicit the way in which we adjust expectations based on the available information.

I always find myself assured that I'm doing something useful by falling back on the above six domains of comprehension while designing learning activities. Students never fail to be able to engage with these strategies and it's almost always useful in a wide range of contexts.

Food for thought :)

Galway Man: Stage 5 English

Hello and how are you? It feels like only yesterday that the 2019 school year was just starting and now here we are in Term 4. Before you know it, the last assessment tasks will be done and dusted, reports will be written, and students will start thinking about building forts in the woods and riding their BMXs down to the river (kids still spent their summer holidays doing that, right?)

In the last few weeks of Term 4 I usually find myself needing a few stand-alone lessons. It's important that these lessons don't feel like 'throw-away' content... when students cotton on that you don't attach value to what they're doing then they'll tend not to value it either. The antidote to this can be to work on the skills needed for ongoing success in English.

This lesson below is a Stage 5 activity that I usually use for Year 9 as part of a genre unit focused on creative writing. It can also double, however, as something that can be used to help students develop specialised literacy skills at any point in Stage 5 - for example, the ability to identify genre through recognition of common motifs and generic conventions used, the ability to monitor a text for adjectives and adjectival groups, and utilising comprehension skills to predict the direction a text will go in.

Context

Teaching Stage 5 English in a mixed ability classroom often means working with a broad range of students. Differentiated curriculum can take many forms when we teach and, perhaps most often, it tends to come into the classroom in a flexible rapid-response form via the teacher adapting to the fluctuating levels of ability exhibited by individual students. 

One of my favourite forms of differentiation is the the lesson planning process adapted from the Gagne model and used by GERRIC. This involves creating material that targets three separate tiers of ability within the classroom - mainstream material for the core of the class, adapted material for those who may be struggling to meet outcomes, and extension material for those who may be considered gifted. It's important to acknowledge here that 'extension' doesn't mean extra work, it should instead take the place of work undertaken by the main core of the class.

Another thing to acknowledge is that it's near impossible to differentiate every single lesson of work in this way as it essentially means doing three times the work. Instead, it's worth aiming to just do this every now and again so that you can assess what level your students are working at and evaluate how they cope with material that more specifically targets their ability level.

The Lesson: Galway Man

The crux of this lesson is a short horror story called Galway Man. This piece has been designed as something that should be suitable for a Year 9 class exhibiting a range of different abilities and behaviours.

What this means is - it's relatively short to allow for engagement of students who struggle with attention in the classroom, and it's written in a way to allow accessibility for students who may have reading levels as low as those typically encountered in Stage 3. It's important to push student reading levels by exposing them to material that will challenge them but this is something that should be done purposefully and not all the time. If we're looking to build things like vocabulary, sustained understanding via extensive comprehension of cohesion, or an ability to parse sophisticated sentence structures then, of course, we should be challenging students with texts beyond their usual reading scope. However, if we want to work on introducing students to other skills like understanding symbolism and imagery, or the ability to explain genre, then we need simply-constructed texts that can allow for these things to be the focus.

Resource: Galway Man - short story.

The Lesson: Pre-Reading

Before reading the text it might be worth doing a quick check of student understanding regarding the phenomenon of bog bodies as this is the main idea behind the 'horror' of the text. These bodies are human remains that have been accidentally preserved for thousands of years after being submerged in swampy peat-heavy marshland. Bog bodies tend to occur in Western Europe and date from the Bronze Age.

Resource: Pre-Reading - PowerPoint Presentation.

The Lesson: Post-Reading

Students can undertake one of the activity sheets after reading the short story. There are two ways to approach determining who does which sheet:

1. Hand out the three different levels of sheets according to which students you think fit into the 'core', 'adjusted', and 'extension' groupings of ability. If any students question why they can't have a different sheet then, by all means, let them have a go at the sheet they prefer. If they find it too easy then you've both learned something, if they find it too hard then at least they challenged themselves.
2. Let students pick the sheet they want to do - I usually place the sheets on a table underneath the whiteboard with arrows pointing down to the three piles labelling them as 'Regular', 'Hard', and 'Hardest'. It can very educational for the teacher to see which students pick which one. 

The sheets roughly correspond to the same pattern of learning broken into 4-5 sections.

• Prediction: After students have been taken through the pre-reading PPT, ask them to think about what a short story called Galway Man might be about. Students then compare their prediction to how the story turned out.
• Adjectives: Monitor the text to locate and isolate adjectives/adjectival groups.
• Character or Flashback: Students actively consider the process of characterisation. This looks different on each sheet - ranging from a visualisation activity to an opportunity for students to draw explicit connections between a character and his purpose in the text. Some sheets may add or replace this with an examination of the story's use of a flashback as a structural narrative device.
• Genre: Students identify the ways in which the story fits into a specific genre, developing increased awareness of the significance of code and convention.

Resource: Adjusted Activity sheet
Resource: Core Activity sheet
Resource: Extension Activity sheet

Comparative Study: Elysium Comprehension Questions

In this post I outlined my thinking for teaching a Comparative Study on Animal Farm and Elysium. Whilst there isn't much point in presenting resources on Animal Farm (there are plenty of activities on Orwell's fable already out there), I do think there is a niche to fill on Elysium resources. My previous post detailed the contextual elements that Elysium draws on, so the next logical point from here is to have students work through some study guide questions that get them to engage with the text on a more immediate level. 

The resource below presents a mix of comprehension and visual analysis questions, and requires students to interact with the film on literal, figurative and contextual levels.  I recommend projecting it onto the whiteboard so students can see the screenshots in full colour.

Resource - Elysium Student Guide (click to download).

I've also included a teacher version for ease of delivery, which gives possible answers. If you use this, please don't feel restricted by my answers. I actually composed most of these answers via whole class discussion with my Year 11 Advanced English students, and there are no doubt a whole bunch of other interpretations that would work in response to the questions as well.

Resource - Elysium Teacher Guide (click to download).

Happy Dystopias!

Extending Stage 4 Students in English

Blueback, a novel that I highly recommend for Year 7 students - it's both easy to read and possesses depth of language/ideas.

In addition to my role as classroom teacher, I also work at my school as the Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator. This has predominantly meant the implementation of a class-sized pull-out program for identified gifted students (more on this at a future date), however, before I got to that point I piloted an experimental phase in which individual students with potential giftedness were targeted. At the time (2 years ago), I was teaching a mixed-ability Year 7 English class. There were two students in particular in this class who showed classic signs of advanced ability and I wanted to give them a meaningful opportunity to use and stretch this ability. 

It's worth noting that these were the sort of students who would not initially present as gifted upon first impression but, after extensive diagnostic testing, I felt that I had confirmed that their potential had gone unrecognised. Before I could create a larger program that would cater to students such as these and, indeed, develop a system of testing that would establish levels of giftedness amongst their entire cohort, it would be necessary to pilot a smaller program of increased support that would prove the validity of specifically catering for gifted students. 

So now we get to the real point of this blog entry, extending these two Year 7 students with activities based on the current topic that was running during class-time. In line with the requisite academic research, I decided that the work had to be:

• Relevant to what was being studied. 
• Not a simple case of 'extra' work.
• The kind of work that would challenge these students enough to allow them to devote the same amount of quality time that any other student would spend on core activities back in the mixed classroom. 

Anything less would risk student disengagement, the same sort of thing that led to these kids 'flying under the radar' in the first place.   

The topic in question back in 2014 was a novel study of Tim Winton's beautiful ecological story Blueback. The resource I've attached below was designed to be used by tutors who had been assigned to the targeted students, but, really, it can be used in any context.

In Stage 4, annotating texts is probably something that most students would not be completely comfortable with. I usually introduce it to Year 9 students, which put me in mind of using it with gifted Year 7s as it would be a step-up for them. The style of annotation featured in the resource makes use of a few higher order skills:

• The annotating of techniques is a form of attribute-listing that requires students to taxonomise information in their heads.
• The second part of the activity, in which students identify their own techniques, contains elements of backwards-engineering. 
• Explicitly teaching the skill of annotating equips gifted students with a method that they can use to design their own systems for note-taking.

I've resisted explaining the actual mechanics of the resource in any great detail because it's all on the sheet below. If you have any specific activities that you like to use to extend junior students, please feel free to drop me a comment below - I'm always on the look-out for more ideas!

Resource: Extending Stage 4 Students in English