Teach Secondary 13.5

largest number of correctly spelt words. To make things more competitive, have the students compete in teams or pairs and enter their final scores on a shared leaderboard. Fancy a poem? If you’re struggling to engage students with lengthy stories, why not try sharing and reading a poem? Websites like Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org) or Poetry by Heart (poetrybyheart.org.uk) can give you quick and easy access to a wide range of poems. Your students could read poems out loud, read them in pairs and even perform them. To develop their study of poems further, try asking the class: • What’s the focus of this poem? • What emotions and feelings are expressed within the poem? • Whose perspective is being shared in the poem? • Which poetic techniques have been used and why? • What is the writer’s intention in writing this poem? MATHSACTIVITIES Countdown One way for students to practice rapid calculations is to play the game shown on TV as Countdown . There are a number of recreations hosted online that you could use on the classroom display – or, if you’re confident in your ownmathematical abilities... 1.Decide on a number you want the students to reach 2.Give students a selection of numbers that they can use to reach that number 3.Set a timer for 30 seconds or 1 minute 4.Whoever reaches the sum first within the time set gets to show the rest of the class how they did so Mathematical problems You can find plenty of mathematical problems with accompanying answers on the internet. Copy and paste one such problem for your students (ensuring that you’ve had a proper go at trying to solve the problem yourself first). The process of solving the problemwill help to develop your students’ literacy and maths skills at the same time, since they’ll need to be able to read the problem critically. See below for a few examples... • A shop needs to increase the cost of a book from £25 to £35. By what percentage has the price increased? • Eight of my pets aren’t dogs, five aren’t rabbits, and seven aren’t cats. How many pets do I have? • Amouse costs £10, a bee costs £15, and a spider costs £20. Howmuch does a duck cost? Go shopping! You can use the language and features of online shopping to help build your students’ numeracy skills. Create imaginary ‘baskets’ of items and then get your students adding up totals, deducting percentages to come within a sale price and subtracting items from the basket. This can not only help students practice the basic numeracy skills of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, but also improve their mental arithmetic through the process of calculating percentages. Formula of theweek KS4 students who’ll soon be heading into the exam room must be able to memorise certain formulas for their maths GCSE – so in the run-up to the exams, prepare a different curriculum- mapped maths formula each week for them to memorise, apply to a specific problem or teach each other about. If you’re unsure about doing this, liaise with a maths teacher in your school and ask if they can pass on any past papers, or recommend any good websites with advice and resources for non-maths specialists. Teach it! Students who have mastered the skills expected of them in literacy and numeracy could try their hand at teaching their peers within the safe, low-stakes environment of your tutor group - explaining their approach to working out maths problems, or how they go about responding to questions on the GCSE maths paper more generally. Five a day Aim to give students a mix of 5 short numeracy and literacy activities each day. If designing and organising these is likely to be difficult, you could potentially have students design them for their peers. If you can, maintain a mix of activities to keep them guessing – potentially spanning maths problems, story creation, specific reading tasks and other activities. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meera Chudasama is an English, media and film studies teacher with a passion for design and research, and has developed course content for the Charted College of Teaching FREE RESOURCES Spell it! activity handout bit.ly/ts135-FA1 ‘Five a day’ handout template bit.ly/ts135-FA2 37 teachwire.net/secondary P E D A G O G Y