These are all paired AQA Language section B tasks, one for paper one and one for paper two. I’ve been using two per week throughout this academic year! Recently, our school has altered its behaviour policy and is running after school detentions. I’ve created these as purposeful writing tasks for our students to complete during these detentions. The aim is to develop students’ planning and writing abilities whilst getting them to consider the nature of their behaviour and the value of education. This means that all of these are about character development and SMSC in addition to exam preparation. There is a simple layout, inspired by ‘The Learning Scientists’ though I’m not sure that Oliver Caviglioli would approve of the boxes used in the design! Planning space is provided and, I would advise, should be used to ensure that students develop a structure prior to actually writing. I would print this on A3 paper for it to be most useful. Do get in touch with any feedback! I may well add more as time goes on… If you like these, check out my other resources, follow me on instagram/twitter or pop over to my blog: https://idealisticteacher.edublogs.org/author/idealisticteacher/

This writing challenge focuses on describing the festival Holi - it might be worthwhile showing students a video of a paint fight during the festival. KS4 students would benefit most from this writing activity which could be done as a stand alone lesson or to support the teaching of English Language paper one in general. This activity would be useful as stretch activities for more able students, although it would be possible to run through it as a class activity (perhaps planning together) for less able students. For students who are just coming across writing description for the first time, it would be useful to run through how to plan and write it up separately, before focusing on editing and improving. The Writing Revolution would suggest that approaching it through describing as a teacher (modelling how it’d done), then in pairs and then indvidually would lead to better responses too. Additionally, the formatting and layout has been influenced by ‘The Learning Scientist’ and their principles on how to make resources most accessible. Take a look at my blog and other resources! http://idealisticteacher.edublogs.org/