Punctuation

Punctuation is always an ongoing area of focus in my classroom for all year groups, no matter what topic we are studying. My T.A. has helped me produce these punctuation booklets for discrete practise.

The activities all focus on Capital Letters, "Speech Marks" and Commas for Clauses (e.g. My dog, who is called Pickle, likes to bark in the garden.) Pam Hook , the SOLO Guru, has kindly offered to send me a table which will explain how I can 'SOLO-ise' punctuation, as I'm still confused about that at the moment.

Learning Intentions, Learning Objectives... part 4

Okay so some more blogging on Learning Intentions. Year 9 have just started a huge project: "Spoken Language of a Public Figure". Here is an example of an exercise students completed which examined how rapport can be built with the audience. This particular student is getting towards the top of the group. I've also included a close up of my SOLO Taxonomy Learning Intentions for the project:

 

 

 

 

Any feedback concerning my SOLO Learning Intentions is very welcome, please contact me via my Twitter: @teachesliteracy .

What's my SOLO Level?

For those of you who'd like to download a free copy of my SOLO Level Assessment sheet, you can find a PDF here:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5wKj1KHNZvSQ0xMYjIxdGVwRnM/edit?usp=sharing

If you share this, a link back to me would be appreciated!

Update on yesterday's punctuation lesson with Year 9

Just an update on yesterday's punctuation lesson with Year 9. Here is an example of the work that was produced (this student is in the middle of the group):

 

Now I just need to figure out how to assess this under SOLO... Any advice/suggestions very welcome! 

Learning Intentions, Learning Objectives...part 3

I modified my creative writing Year 9 Learning Intentions today so that they were aligned with SOLO Taxonomy. The focus was on using a variety of punctuation with accuracy. Here they are:

I found this really difficult to do, because the SOLO verbs don't seem to easily lend themselves to demonstrating correct use of punctuation in my mind. I'm not particularly satisfied with my second Learning Intention and I want to change it, but I don't know how! I need to have a longer think about it; any suggestions for how to improve number 2 would be extremely welcome. You can find me on Twitter! Also I am still, as ever, interested in seeing your Learning Intentions/Objectives!

Learning Intentions, Learning Objectives..... part 2

Continuing from yesterday's post...

This half term Year 7 and 8 have been improving their Literacy by investigating Climate Change and Sustainability. Year 7 and 8 have a NC (English) range of levels from 1a/2c to 3a/4c. Today I began a series of lessons that have the outcome of writing and performing a persuasive speech for the Head to make our school more 'eco-friendly'.

Last night I re-wrote my Learning Intentions for the first sequence of lessons to make them align with Solo Taxonomy. You can see them below:

 

 

I am happy that these are well aligned to SOLO, and because I have done this my Success Criteria and assessment of their understanding/progress is very clear (this is why I like using SOLO so much!)

Here you can see some of the work we've started on over three lessons today. First of all we listed ideas on our brainstorms, and then wrote sentences to explain our reasoning. Imagining and predicting wider impacts will come in future lessons:

 

 

I have also been talking to Natalie Ford on Twitter about SOLO Learning Intentions and she has given me some interesting ideas to think about, which I'm definitely going to develop over the next few weeks:

 

 

 

(Sorry, haven't figured out how to embed Twitter conversations yet...!)

 

I'm still really interested to share Learning Intentions/Objectives and SOLO with anyone else, so if you'd like to share yours with me I'd really appreciate the development opportunity! You can upload them to Twitter and tag me in them!

 

 



Climate Change: Persuasive writing

This half term Year 7 and 8 have been investigating Climate Change. We have assessed our understanding of the issue with SOLO Taxonomy. This has culminated in writing a persuasive letter for our school newspaper to encourage both parents and students to reduce their carbon footprint. We are still in the rough draft stages.

Persuasive writing is not a new topic to us, last half term we investigated the Romans and wrote persuasive letters about Gladiator fighting. This time we had to revise the techniques and come up with some snappy sentence starters before we began to plan the structure of our letters. You can see our progress below, we've still go some way to go before we finish!

 

This is a writing frame that 3 students came up with. The topic of the paragraph is in blue, the 'super sentence starter' is in red, and the persuasive technique is in black.

 

 

Here you can see two rough drafts. They haven't stuck exactly to plan, but that's okay, I do encourage students to 'go with the flow' sometimes.

 

Next we will read our letters and check for capitals, commas and full stops (highlighters will probably be used) and then we'll do a little bit of peer assessment- mostly along the lines of "my favourite sentence was...because...I think you could improve this sentence...by...") Students can then make a few changes before I mark it, and finally they can write it up in neat.

SOLO 5 Min Lesson Plan

For those who'd like to download a free copy of my SOLO Five Minute Lesson Plan, you can find a PDF here:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5wKj1KHNZvScWwxSF9rdE5teFk/edit?usp=sharing

I got this idea from Teacher Toolkit (Twitter: @teachertoolkit) and also Pam Hook (@arti_choke). Please feel free to share, but a link back to me would be appreciated!