Visit our student blog at: http://sittingbourneskillsplus.blogs2teach.net/

Education Blogs - Literacy & Numeracy

We are about to go live with our blog for students to use and are just ironing out some last minute formatting problems. We are going to use blogs2teach.net.

The purpose of the blog will be:

• for students to share their work with a wider audience
• for students to read and comment on other students' work
• to give (& find) tips on spelling/maths/IT etc.
• to celebrate student achievements
• to provide a different medium for students to communicate with tutors (and vice-versa)

If anyone has had experience of using blogs with their students, in these or other ways, please let us know how it has worked. We are especially interested in finding out how useful the students perceive the blogs to be, and whether tutors have had difficulty incorporating the use of blogs into their lessons. Does anyone know of any formal research that has been done in this area?

RaW Quiz

The library has returned the completed quiz sheets (from the World Book Day competition) to us and has pronounced JS the winner of the £10 gift voucher - well done to him! 16 students from our centre completed the quiz, with 5 getting all of the answers correct. These five did rather better than the Poet and I: our poor knowledge of Star Wars let us down just a little (no problem there for the Book Worm)! We are keen to repeat this in the future, as the students said that they really enjoyed taking part. The quiz also got students chatting to each other and it encouraged many of them to research information on the Internet. Next time we might ask the library to do the quiz at two levels: providing an easier quiz might give the poor tutors a chance of getting the questions right!

Having read the spelling related posts I thought I would share the following anonymous poem which I came across recently. It can be found in an excellent book by Vivian Cook called 'Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary - or why can't anybody spell?' and illustrates some of the many problem words in English spelling. It gave rise to plenty of discussion with my small group of Level 1 learners (especially when I owned up to having to use a dictionary myself to find the correct pronunciation of 'lough'!) :-

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird
And dead, it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

MENTORING / MATHS LANGUAGE

Yesterday, The Poet and I went to a training day about mentoring. It was very useful and really clarified the roles and responsibilities of the mentor as well as making us think about how we can best support our mentees (tutors new to SfL who are studying for their Level 4 subject specialisms). It was one of those rare sessions where the training element was as good as the lunch provided!

A side benefit of attending these training sessions (other than the rather good lunches) is having the chance to chat to other practitioners from your own and other organisations and yesterday I got chatting about maths teaching with another tutor. As a literacy tutor who teaches rather a lot of numeracy, I am very interested in the language we use to make maths meaningful to our students. This tutor told me that when he teaches averages and range he always begins by talking about the vastness of mountain ranges and US ranges (Little House on the Prairie style), whereas I have always been far more domestic and talk about price range in shops etc.! This led us on to discussing MOde - Most Of or most fashionable; median, which sounds like medium and so must come in the middle; and mean, which really is mean as it involves doing the most maths!

Students often complain that they are not sure how to approach maths problems because they can't remember what a particular word in a problem means. This is especially true for students with dyslexia. Does anyone have any strategies for helping with this?

Mnemonic

This one helped me to spell necessary but food always works for me!

never
eat
cake
eat
sausage
sandwiches
and
rhubarb
yoghurt

SKILLS FOR LIFE NETWORK

The new e-newsletter from Skills for Life Network is out. It is a useful source of information about resources, curriculum, training, policies etc. You can find it at http://www.skillsforlifenetwork.com/project.asp?pjk=1&mod=0 (You will need to set up a username/password to access the information, but it only takes a couple of minutes.)

This month's newsletter includes a link to a site containing resources that can be used with the new Quick Reads books.

APOSTROPHES

Young Lover was thrilled with the news that students are going to have to learn where to put their apostrophes if they want a good GCSE grade in English: see story at http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/story/0,,1722933,00.html .

There are some good games and quizzes at http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/grammar/punctuation/apostrophes/ for anyone wanting to improve their punctuation.