Tag: strategies
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VCE English 2023: Mentor Texts and Ideas
This is the fourth in a series of posts on the upcoming 2023 VCE English and EAL Study Design. For the first three posts, see the links at the end. Mentor Texts In the new Study Design mentor texts are “Texts to be read and re-read as models of effective and cohesive writing.” They are […]
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Pulling it all together
This is the sixth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous four posts on Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, Inferring and Summarising. Synthesising is the final of the six Reading Strategies. As I […]
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In your own words
This is the fifth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous four posts on Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, and Inferring. Summarising involves recalling the main events or ideas from a text. The […]
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Reading between the lines
This is the fourth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous three posts on Making Connections, Visualising, and Questioning. Inferring means ‘reading between the lines’. In practice, however, it’s one of the […]
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Making Connections
This is the first in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. The six Reading Strategies offer a way of teaching reading for meaning which goes beyond simple comprehension or teacher-led questioning. Making Connections, the first Strategy, […]
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Making the most of Head Start
As term 4 draws to a close, many schools will have some form of Head Start or acceleration program for senior students. For our school, that means our Y11s move up to their Y12 classes for the final fortnight of term. For new senior teachers, this might be the first time you have encountered a […]
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Activity spotlight: One minutes, three minutes, five minutes, write!
This is a great activity for encouraging students to do more than just glance at a text before trying to write a response, or answer a direct question. A lot of the time, our students want to rush ahead and just, “get the job done,” when we really want them to provide a thoughtful response. […]
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Finding Writing Models
If you’ve read any of my other posts, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of using quality writing models in the English classroom for everything from creative writing to an alternative to the dreaded TEEL. And I’m not alone in thinking that one of the best ways to learn how to write well is […]
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TEEL is a four-letter word
Before coming to Australia I’d never heard of TEEL, but as soon as I stepped into the classroom, I was confronted by this strange and menacing acronym. TEEL – Topic Evidence Explanation Link – is a scaffold for writing essay paragraphs. Of course, if you’re an English teacher, you don’t need me to tell you […]
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Activity Spotlight: Text Walk
The Text Walk, also known as a chalk talk, is one of the foundational activities in our English classrooms. It serves as the basis for many of our other activities, and a springboard for discussion. Most importantly, the text walk is a means of getting students to engage with short extracts of texts for themselves, […]
Leon Furze 