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 .

Using highlighters to check punctuation progress

An ongoing focus in my classroom is improving our use of punctuation. To check on individual progress I had students copy a mini-story from the board, and they had to put in capital letters, commas and speech marks. We then peer marked the work. Markers had to highlight the things they thought were correct, incorrect or missing in three different colours. I could then quickly see how both the original student and the marker are getting on. Plus the highlighters emerging from the cupboard always seems to send a stir of excitement around the room!

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!