Caroline’s Fantastic English Blog

As you can tell this blog has been a little quiet for rather some time. Please visit my new blog at englishatstmichaels.edublogs.org for a brand new English site with lots of information for English teachers and students in Preparatory schools.

Are you teaching Poems from Other Cultures this term or thinking of revising it with year 11? Do you want to find some alternative methods for teaching it? Have you considered using Youtube? Probably not. But for some interesting presentations of the poems have a look at the links below. Alternatively consider getting your students to make their own powerpoints or videos about the poems. Here are three examples (for more go to www.youtube.com and search for the title of the poem you want plus the word poem):

Search for my tongue:

Blessing:

Vultures:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbdkp35A8Wc

Eager to keep up with the latest children’s fiction? Have a look at http://www.lovereading.co.uk and www.lovereading4kids.co.uk  for free extracts and reduced book prices.

With the start of the term, exam revision is calling. Below you can find some useful resources and links to help you and your students to embark on the long countdown to SATs and GCSEs:

Mnemonic mania

Use these mnemonic posters to help your students recall those crucial elements for poetry, paragraphing, writing to persuade, writing to describe, unseen media and non-fiction text techniques etc. Any further ideas for mnemonics please leave me a message!

Revision booklet for AQA A

English language paper 1 word mat

English language paper 2 word mat

English literature word mat

Nearly the end of term and if you are like me you are looking forward to a good rest! However just before you do, think ahead to next term and to the forthcoming SATs exams. Time to consider the lead up to the exams. If you have completed a past paper with your year 9 class you might want to analyse the results and look for areas of weakness that you can then revisit and help your pupils improve on next term. On my KS3 page are some useful gap analysis spreadsheets for the reading papers. Just enter the marks your pupils got for each question and it will analyse their performance on each assessment focus.

For some ideas on how to teach for the reading paper check out the lesson plans on the KS3 year 9 page.

Why not try out a different approach when setting a homework task? Get your students to consider a situation or character from more than one perspective by using De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats technique.

Go here for more information about this technique:

http://www.brainboxx.co.uk/A3_ASPECTS/pages/ThinkingHATS.htm

Go here for a free worksheet:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/worksheets/SixThinkingHatsWorksheet.pdf

If you are about to embark on teaching a new novel you have probably browsed Teachit to look for resources and teaching ideas. Don’t forget that the DfES standards site offers some ideas on teaching the class novel. Have a look at:

http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/secondary/keystage3/all/respub/en_novel

After a terrible summer I am now back and am determined this term to get this site looking more fantastic! or at least presentable! I have learned that life is never what you expect so you need to do things while and when you can.

Very timely is this week’s national event : National Poetry Day and so I am posting a few poems on this year’s theme: Dreams

Hope you find them interesting and maybe even useful teaching material for Thursday.

 I really like this one by Lawrence – very short and simple but an original perspective on how we might see dreams depending on our personality:

Dreams
 All people dream, but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind,
Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity.

But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people,
For they dream their dreams with open eyes,
And make them come true.

DH Lawrence

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning

 There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
‘Souls eat souls in the general emptiness’
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
‘It’s all taking place in one mind’
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There’s a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather’s Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel’s Water Music
Horns fill with water
and bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago’s Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhattan Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
Manhattan steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Although rather morbid Rossetti’s powerful imagery is amazing. This is very good for studying poem structure too:

Dreamland 

Where sunless rivers weep 
Their waves into the deep, 
She sleeps a charmed sleep: 
Awake her not. 
Led by a single star, 
She came from very far 
To seek where shadows are 
Her pleasant lot. She left the rosy morn, 
She left the fields of corn, 
For twilight cold and lorn 
And water springs. 
Through sleep, as through a veil, 
She sees the sky look pale, 
And hears the nightingale 
That sadly sings. Rest, rest, a perfect rest 
Shed over brow and breast; 
Her face is toward the west, 
The purple land. 
She cannot see the grain 
Ripening on hill and plain; 
She cannot feel the rain 
Upon her hand. 

Rest, rest, for evermore 
Upon a mossy shore; 
Rest, rest at the heart’s core 
Till time shall cease: 
Sleep that no pain shall wake; 
Night that no morn shall break 
Till joy shall overtake 
Her perfect peace. 

Christina Rossetti

Some other useful sites for National Poetry Day:

http://http://www.nationalpoetryday.co.uk

http://www.poemhunter.com

http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=33

http://www.poetryteachers.com/poetclass/lessons/dream.html

Here is a useful excerpt from the link above:

How to Write a Dream Poem

by Bruce Lansky

 When you’re asleep, the logical part of your brain is shut off while the wild and crazy part of your brain does whatever it darned well wants. That’s why poems about dreams can be so much fun. They can be rich in creative imagery, written in a stream of consciousness style, or “wouldn’t it be great if…” wish lists.

I think my favorite dream poem was published in Sweet Dreams. It was inspired by a Robert Louis Stevenson poem my mother used to read when she’d tuck me into bed.

My Bed is Like a Sailing Ship

 My bed is like a sailing ship-
when I’m tucked in, I take a trip.
I leave behind my busy day
and sail to places far away. I sail past beaches, gleaming white,
with palm trees swaying in the night.
I watch the waves break on the shore,
and then I see my bedroom floor! I blink my eyes, I scratch my head-
my ship is home, I’m back in bed.
My ships goes sailing every night
and sails home in the morning light.

Another idea for teaching if your students are a little poetry phobic might be to ease them in gently with some songs such as:

• California Dreaming – Mamas and Papas
• Daydream Believer – The Monkees
• Dream – Bob Dylan
• Dream a little dream – Beautiful South
• A Bad Dream – Keane
• Dreams – Gabrielle
• Dreams – The Cranberries
• Dreams – Fleetwood Mac
• Sweet Dreams – Eurythmics
• Dreams – The Streets

For a recording of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Dreams’ go to:

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/usf.edu.1335434830?i=1933396609

Here is the poem:

‘Dreams’ by Edgar Allen Poe 

  Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!
  My spirit not awakening, till the beam
  Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.
  Yes! though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,
  ‘Twere better than the cold reality
  Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,
  And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,
  A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.
  But should it be–that dream eternally
  Continuing–as dreams have been to me
  In my young boyhood–should it thus be given,
  ‘Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.
  For I have revelled when the sun was bright
  I’ the summer sky, in dreams of living light
  And loveliness,–have left my very heart
  Inclines of my imaginary apart [1]
  From mine own home, with beings that have been
  Of mine own thought–what more could I have seen?
  ‘Twas once–and only once–and the wild hour
  From my remembrance shall not pass–some power
  Or spell had bound me–’twas the chilly wind
  Came o’er me in the night, and left behind
  Its image on my spirit–or the moon
  Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon
  Too coldly–or the stars–howe’er it was
  That dream was that that night-wind–let it pass.
  _I have been_ happy, though in a dream.
  I have been happy–and I love the theme:
  Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life
  As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
  Of semblance with reality which brings
  To the delirious eye, more lovely things
  Of Paradise and Love–and all my own!–
  Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.

My ambition has always been to write a book and as time is continually my biggest obstacle I guess a blog will have to do for now. I hope you (eventually) find this a useful place to visit. With time I am intending this blog to be a resource site for English teachers where I can share the snazzy snippets or vast volumes of materials that I bump into in my travels around the county.