Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Revision Help

Here are two handy revision ideas. You can use them to help you remember terminology, key quotations and key themes:


Sunday, 25 September 2016

'Romeo and Juliet' Quotation Revision Song

Try this, ladies, or maybe you can compose a better one!




and the eight quotations explained:

Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Learning Quotations

A teacher's thoughts about why it's important to learn quotations and how to do it: https://joeybagstock.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/how-and-why-i-help-my-students-to-learn-quotations/

His top tips:

  1. Repeated recall
Short starter activity repeated several times over a few lessons that supports the learning of quotations. You should soon start to see a difference and genuinely find the process and the result rewarding.
  1. Missing words
Select about 10 quotations and present them with one, two or three words removed. As you gain more confidence, extend the number and scope of quotations and increase the amount and type of words taken away. The end goal is for students to be able to remember as many quotations as you can entirely from free recall, and then use these wisely to enhance your analysis and interpretation. What is effectively an oral start to the lesson provides fruitful stimulation for the transition into extended writing tasks.
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  1. Anagrams and puzzles
It works particularly well for terms that characters use to describe or refer to each other, such as the myriad of names used to refer to Caliban in The Tempest. Don’t spend long on anagrams and puzzles; the trick is little and often. Knowing well over 15 terms used to define Caliban has helped the students really understand the way in which his character is positioned by language.
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  1. Catch phrase (well, sort of)
This activity is my attempt at applying the rationale building memory palaces to regular short-term lesson starters. Memory palaces are excellent ways of learning quotations – the different rooms and use of imaginative images to support learning lends itself well to remembering vivid images in texts – but they are time-consuming to set up in class, and more suitable for students to complete at home. A quicker way is to select an image or combination of images from Google and then lay them out on a PowerPoint slide as prompts. You can have a lot of fun with this and make the images as easy or hard as you like.
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10 quotations used to describe or define Miranda in The Tempest
  1. Exemplifying statements
Your teacher might begin (or sometimes end) the lesson with ten short statements about the text being studied, for which students have to supply some evidence by way of quotation. The great thing about this technique is that you can have the 10 propositions all together (on a slide or handout) or show them one by one and target certain individuals with the minimum of notice. Again, this approach lends itself to differentiating across and within classes. Once more, it leads effortlessly into elaboration, either by linking the quotations to other ideas or contextual details or deepening understanding through commenting on the methods of presentation used.
Healthy competition
Begin with what level 1 quotation tasks, where you present about 10 or so quotations to be learnt with one or two words missing. Once successfully completed, level 2 tasks are given where the same quotations were present but with different words omitted. Level 3 takes away most of the words except the first one or two to serve as a cue, whilst introducing 5 or so new ones. Level 4 progresses to a combination of images and prompts, whilst level 5 is solely image based. It sounds complicated, but in reality is quite simple. 
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