New School Year - Fresh Ideas

Nothing like a new school year approaching to think about ways to improve on the previous year. I am looking forward to working in a new classroom environment and it has been rather exciting sorting out the learning environment. We have gone through this company 'Class' for the furniture and you can read about that on my other blog soon.

So what is the plan for my Year 10 (14/15yrs) 2014?

This year I want to have a strong literature focus as feedback from students last year said English felt a little like Social Studies at times. We are going to focus on '100 years of texts'. I want  students to have choice in what texts and in how they deliver the work.  This choice is something that is a continual positive with students and also allows their creativity. 

What we will do is create a timeline of decades from 1914 - 2014. Students will choose their texts from decades. How they do this is up to them. They could choose an author and look at a range of work, or a genre and examine how the genre has changed, it will be up to then. They will need to look at a variety of aspects within the texts e.g. character, but they will have to look at context. What was the world like at the time the text was created? What were the possible influences? Who was the author/director? and more.
Student will have to make sure they hit a range of texts, visual, written and oral. As well as presenting their work in a range of ways. This will be for term 1 and 2. Term 3 is creative writing with workshops by our in house author and final speech presentations in preparation for school speech comp. 

I am looking at showing the students how to use sites such as Scoop it to curate information. I will give blogging another go with the class. We started off well last year but by term 3 has lost our way - students losing passwords. I am not to sure what other sites we will use and I plan to search some out this week. I will post what I come across that look good. If you have any useful ones please let me know.