Year 9 – Our Day Out and Matched Guise

We’ve had a lot of positive comments from our Year 9 students about their new unit, “Our Day Out” and their introduction to linguistics in the form of the “matched guise” test. If you’re interested in learning more, or having a go for yourself, watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=956pPCaMxZg or check out Accent Bias Britain’s work (https://accentbiasbritain.org/)

Revision

Getting your adjectives and adverbs in a tangle? Keep getting stuck on “interpreting” and not yet “analysing”? Mrs Hunt is leading revision this week, focusing on language analysis and “writing a lot about a little.” Room A15, 3:10-4:00.

Words of the Month

This month’s words have been *prevalent* all over school, and they’re really beginning to show through in students’ writing. Moreover, when teachers ask for *clarity,* they’re no longer having to explain what the word means! There is one more week with these words, and we’ll start new ones in February. Remember, if you see one of our words “out in the wild,” you can still send us the evidence!

Bedrock Shoutouts

Shoutouts to Megan R (US) and Lewis M (HS) who have made the most progress in between pre- and post- learning tests. They have really challenging words, including “pernicious” and “rapturous,” which may go some way to explain their huge progress, but what amazing words to be working with!

Rotary Club Competition

Our competition for this half term is external, with a deadline of 17th February. This is being run by the Rotary Club, and offers some exciting prizes!

The competition is open to all youngsters aged 14- 18 – ages as at 31st August 2022 and the theme this year is ‘Peace’.
Competition Guidelines and Task

– To produce a written or typed story in prose entitled, ‘Peace’. The written entry could be fiction or non-fiction, prose, or a poem, as long as the piece relates to the theme. Up to maximum of 550 words for prose entries, up to a maximum of 40 lines for poetry entries. No pictures/drawings to be part of the entry.

We’re hoping to support this competition as part of our curriculum this term, but welcome students’ contributions from outside of lessons, too.

Power & Conflict Poetry Revision

Pick two quotations at random using your anthology.

If you can, find a technical term or device that is in those quotes. If you are struggling, identify either “description” or “imagery” (these are just as good as ANY other terms… it is your explanation of the meaning or emotion that they create (and why) will decide your grade.

Then write short exam style answers using these sentence stems:

The poet writes the quotation “_________________”. We can see the technique of ____ being used in the words “____”. This makes the reader think/ feel _____________________

because__________

Collect a bank of these – build this up over time.

Memorise these sentence stems for further revision.