Teach Secondary 13.5

Maximise tutor time With the aid of some fast and engaging activities, tutor time can be used to boost some important cross-curricular skills, says Meera Chudasama ... W hether you have 10 minutes available or even an hour, tutor time can be difficult to plan for alongside the workload involved in teaching your specialist subject. We can, however, use this time to support students in developing their literacy and numeracy skills – particularly when helping younger students acclimatise to the new and unfamiliar demands of secondary school. LITERACYACTIVITIES Reading Getting students to read independently, in pairs, in groups or as a class can provide themwith access to an expanded range of vocabulary and develop their creativity. During tutor time you could try experimenting with these reading strategies: • Assembling a book box every half term • Printing out and reading engaging short stories together – such as Roald Dahl’s ‘The Landlady’ or ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ • Encouraging students to read out passages from stories they’ve found especially interesting or memorable Play, pause, talk Audiobooks are a great way for students (and teachers) to get acquainted with a wider selection of YA fiction. Try subscribing to an audiobook platform for a free trial and listening to an audiobook, while maybe letting your tutor group vote on the choice of title. When the reading is underway, pause at key moments in the story to question your students’ understanding of the plot, core characters and key events. You could even use audiobooks to establish links with key topics that students are currently learning about across the curriculum. This is the news… Make your students more aware of the wider world by showing themhow to be critical readers and develop their own informed opinions of world events. Organise a ‘newspaper morning’ in which a selection of of tabloid and/or broadsheet newspapers are prominently displayed somewhere in the classroom, or project an online news article from a reputable source on the board. Showing students news reports from a range of different agencies and providers will illustrate how the same topic can be presented frommultiple viewpoints and perspectives. Cross-curricular links Ask students about the up and coming topics they’ll soon be learning about, and maybe create a calendar detailing key topics throughout the term ahead. Source information that students wouldn’t normally have access to, but which will give them a contextual understanding for their studies. Alternatively, task students with finding articles, blogposts, leaflets and other online media that could provide additional background information for their studies. Ensuring that students are exposed to a breadth of knowledge will provide themwith opportunities to broaden what they already know. Class research Ask your students what area or topic they would love to study if given the chance, and design half-termly class research projects that focus on these topics of interest. If, for example, the topic was climate change, you could try to locate key speeches, recent news reports, weather data, historical reports and other forms of information to give students a wider frame of reference for the issues involved. At the end of the project, have the students show and explain to each other what they’ve discovered. Hosting a class project will expose students to reading embedded inmany different forms. Spell it! Give students a series of nine random letters, making sure that there’s good mix of vowels and consonants. Display a timer on the board, and then get them to create as many different words as possible. You could potentially give out prizes for the longest correctly spelt word, or the “Showstudents how tobe critical readers anddevelop their ownopinions of worldevents” 36 teachwire.net/secondary