Just Looking

YISers,

Your blogs will have different purposes, they will be:

a way for you to share your ideas about books you have read and films you have watched

a way for you to develop your knowledge and enjoyment of different types of literature, art and films and for your teachers and classmates to help you become more skilled at writing about these things

a place for you to showcase the essays, stories, films and projects that you create at school

Your blog is your learning space, please use it well….Mr C

The more I teach, the less I teach. The longer I want students to remember something the more I really try to let students work things out for themselves. Two of my current classes (hello grades 7 and 8 at Yokohama International School) are working on different writing assignments. One class are writing magazine articles and the other essays about literature. These are different types of tasks for different audiences but there are certain things that you always need to remember.

You need to start well.

You need to think about the audience and purpose of the task.

You need a plan.

You need to use the right ‘register’

But here I go giving a whole lot of instructions. I remember being told by teachers, plan, plan , plan, you need to have a plan. I liked writing (at least in secondary school I did) but I hated being restricted to the teacher’s plan. I used to start planning, then run out of steam, then just start. So now I often get my students to just start, just start writing and then as we are going along we look at planning and topic sentences and thesis statements and all that stuff.

You can of course find loads of advice about writing essays online. Essays are still the thing that most students find themselves doing for most of their education, therefore it is no surprise that it is easy to find a lot of advice on-line.

Click here for a link to lots of links with lots of good advice:

There is a really good one.

It has a really nice clickable way of looking at the different elements that put together create an effective essay. You may need to install a plugin called shockwave to view this but I got it to work eventually.

I will add some writing plans and frames that my students created soon.

cc

KES is a good film for any day but especially a Sunday. This film comes from the same mould as Bill Naughton’s collection of short stories called ‘The Goalkeeper’s revenge’ and other stories. The settings for all these stories are hard English working class towns and cities, like Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. These places may not be more than football teams to you now but they were (like my own hometown of Glasgow) the industrial heart of the whole United Kingdom. My own childhood was not like those you will find in KES or Bill Naughton’s short stories but I did grow up with these stories because we read them in school and watched dramas like these on the BBC.

I have, up until now, avoided this type of communication. I am an old fashioned e-mailer. I think this will be a good way for us to share ideas, to show what we have been reading, watching, writing and creating. As I write my son, Jake lies asleep on the carpet. His mum has just burnt something in the kitchen and the whole house smells of smoked potatoes, similar to pancakes that are just too burnt to eat unless you are really hungry.

The first novel I am going to recommend is ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ by Mark Haddon. Books that are popular with adults and children are rare, very rare. Adults still like books that they read when they were younger but that is different. This book is written in the first person by an autistic boy. What the writer does that is so clever is to show us everything that Christopher sees but also a lot that he doesn’t understand. This is an inventive, original and highly accessible novel, weird, interesting fun and intelligent. It is not a children’s book or an adult book, it is just pure and simply a great book.