Welcome to my little newsletter. I thought I'd write this as a sum up of all of the bits and pieces that are going on at Word Academy and some of the things that are coming soon. Goodbye year 11 and 13 I have genuinely loved teaching my year 11 and 13s this year. I've come across some dedicated, engaged, beautiful people that deserve to do really well. My year 11s may be at the age that are often accused of being lazy and unappreciative but these students have proved that to

I bloody hate these exams. GCSEs and SATs have ripped the soul out of the education system over the past few years. Many of the things that 11 year olds are expected to know to have had a successful primary education are just mind blowingly boring as well as completely unnecessary for the real world. At the secondary schools I have taught at, the SATs have been largely ignored and students have been retested at the start of year 7 to get a more "real" assessment of where they

When people do these lists they tend to spend lots of time trying to look clever because that makes them sound like an expert and that's good for them. Well, I'm not going to try and sound clever...! Because actually that is NOT going to impress the children we are trying to inspire. I remember when I was a child the magic of books and the way that I could be sucked into different lives. My big reads in those days were "Sweet Valley High," "Point Horror" and "The Babysitter's

7 months since I opened, 10 months since I had the first thought of becoming an entrepreneur (Is that what I am??), here are my top 5 moments! Moment 1 I am working with my year 11 group. They are writing persuasive letters. A lad with dyslexia writes a complaint about bad service at a restaurant. I read it. I laugh. It's funny! I look at him; his face lights up. He's so pleased to have got it right and I can see his confidence soar. This is what it's all about. Moment 2 It's

This Comic Relief, one of my primary classes put together a persuasive video about their choice of topic, homelessness. They've learned so much about emotive language, use of anecdotes, statistics, facts and giving opinions over the last few weeks! Well done, Word Academy!

It’s probably worth mentioning that time is something I have very little patience for. My natural approach to life is to jump into any given situation feet first because if I want something, I want it now; I want it yesterday. I love to be busy and my mind is always whirring and moving at a much quicker pace than my body (although I have started running, so even that is moving quicker than it used to!) Unfortunately, when I move quickly, I make mistakes. When I run, I fall ov

I've been listening to a few podcasts recently and found Professor John Dunlosky's information that he recently shared with TES magazine really useful. He is a professor at the Kent State University, Ohio and has studied what revision techniques work and do not work. All of the following relates to all subjects but obviously, as an English tutor, I'm focusing on English revision. So how can you learn quotations, themes, characters, plots, exam techniques, language and structu

It's February half term and let's admit it, the GCSEs are swimming nauseatingly near. For parents as well as teenagers, it's a nerve-wracking time whether you've got a child who already has their GCSE timetable colour-coded and laminated or a child who is burying their head ever deeper under their winter duvet. I'm here to give you clarity about the English Language and English Literature GCSEs and what revision must be, could be, should be done. I'll also give you some knowl

Firstly, I will get my wavers in: I am not a perfect parent. My children are wild; they fight incessantly with each other; I let them get disgustingly dirty in the garden; I don't iron their clothes; I forget to send them in with what they need for school sometimes; they sometimes forget their please and thank-yous despite being too old to do so and my youngest regularly licks the soles of his shoes and I don't know what to do about it. I AM NOT PERFECT. And I would never pre

A few weeks into full-time and I'm settling in to my new speed of life. Days whizz by, evenings whizz by. I feel like I never stop working but also that I never start working because I'm enjoying it all so much. Here's a little insight into a week at Word Academy. Monday - Mondays are up and out and off to Sowerby Bridge to teach my lovely 8 year old home educated student. We have been using his love of camping as a stimulus for reading and writing. Over the past few weeks, w

Whether you are 8 or 88, we could all do with more vocabulary. Where would we be without the beauty of the words chatoyant (like a cat's eye), halcyon (happy and carefree) or insouciance (blithe nonchalance)? In fact, according to The Economist, by the time we are 8 most children know about 10,000 words, rising to anywhere between 25,000 and 35,000 words as an adult. Since the Oxford Dictionary has around 170,000 words in the dictionary that are in current use and around 47,0

This November in recognition of the 100 year anniversary of the end of World War One, Word Academy English Key Stage 4 classes are on the subject of war. My year 11 class is going to be reading speeches in times of war, including Churchill's "On the beaches" speech and they will be reading and writing articles giving their opinions on war. My year 9 and 10 class are studying fiction this half term and so we will be reading and studying language and structure based on texts se

Last year, I was teaching my year 10 class and had asked them to write a gothic story in 200 words and in 20 minutes... The look on their faces was one of horror. However, this is an important skill in the current GCSE system. Students have 45 minutes to write a story or description at the end of a gruelling GCSE exam paper. For most students the time constraints of the first 4 questions means that they actually have far less than the 45 minutes in reality. So faced with 15 h

If you need some GCSE tuition and live in the Bradford/ Keighley , have a look around my site. We would love to see you in one of our GCSE tuition classes for years 10 and 11 in Oxenhope. #teach #romeoandjuliet #shakespeare #fate #tutor #tuition #gcseenglishliterature Or sign up at the "Members" section for more resources like this!

Well, Word Academy, Oxenhope, has been up and running for a whole week. But what is it that pushes a successful secondary English teacher to give up the state school system and go lone wolf English tutor? To be honest, that may be one for a later blog but I can go some way to answer it with some thoughts from the last week... 1) I can teach what I want to... This is the moment where there should be harps playing and the clouds should part to let through the sunlight. To be cl