How can you teach creative writing unless you're a practising writer yourself? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But whilst most secondary school English teachers could probably tell you what book they're currently reading for pleasure without a second's hesitation, ask what they're writing and in most cases the reaction will likely … Continue reading CURATING THE LINE: the impact on trainee English teachers of belonging to a peer-run writing group
Sometimes you read an article or blog post by another teacher and think, 'Yes! Thank goodness somebody else thinks that too!' That was the case this week when I read a post by Emma Turner called 'Powerpoint and IWBs - It's time to reclaim analogue teaching'. Turner, a highly experienced teacher, school leader and education … Continue reading Cut-out poetry – reclaiming analogue teaching
One of the highlights of the PGCE year is our visit to the Botanic Garden in Cambridge where, after a picnic lunch, the trainees explore the garden and devise creative writing tasks for each other, to be done at specific locations in the garden. We put all the ideas into a hat and each person … Continue reading Visit to the Botanic Garden
There was a moment in a Year 7 lesson in the first week of September when the surrealism of what I was doing convinced me I was in a dream. I was introducing myself to a new class in the middle of my first full teaching day after the lockdown. My head was hot inside … Continue reading Playing netball in a lampshade
The question of How I'm teaching seems much more pertinent than What I'm teaching right now. With 23 years' experience under my belt, it's a long time since I've had to learn so much so quickly in order to do my job. Parts of the media and government would have everyone believe that the only … Continue reading Lockdown teaching
I've been keeping a diary since I was 12, when, after a few false starts, it became a daily routine. By the time I was in my late teens I knew that this was a habit I'd keep for life; now, I find it unimaginable to think how I would function without it. I'm not … Continue reading Pandemic journals
I'm really grateful to my friend Sean Dooley for sending me a poem written on seeded paper all the way from Shanghai and setting my teachers' writing group the challenge of writing our own poems on plantable paper. We'll meet later this week to share our poems, with a view to planting them afterwards and … Continue reading Living words
What a lovely pile of marking! Following our study of Shaun Tan's The Arrival, half of my Year 9 class chose to write stories in which they experimented in words with some of the visual techniques that Tan uses (such as zooming-in), whilst the other half created their own graphic novels. I'm blown away by … Continue reading Graphic novels inspired by ‘The Arrival’
I'm teaching one of my favourite texts with my Year 9 class at the moment - The Arrival by Shaun Tan. It might seem strange to be studying an entirely wordless graphic novel in an English classroom, but I find that it lends itself to a sophisticated level of very close 'reading' of each image, … Continue reading ‘The Arrival’ by Shaun Tan
Our Year 7 Poetry scheme of work covers poems from a range of periods and in a diverse range of forms and styles. Throughout the unit, students read and explore poems by professional poets and are then invited to respond with their own work, learning about aspects of craft such as rhythm, line breaks and … Continue reading Year 7 poetry anthologies