5 tips for challenging your gifted students when studying Lord of the Flies

How to challenge your gifted and talented students when studying Lord of the Flies as part of their GCSE in English Literature:

Use all levels of Blooms Taxonomy when setting activities and questions, particularly the top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

  1. Give your students control over their own learning by setting a variety of activities they could complete when studying the key aspects of the novel, so they choose what’s appropriate for them.
  2. Explore the similarities and differences between the novel and its characters and other texts, such as Heart of Darkness and Paradise Lost.
  3. Prompt specificity in exam answers and show how it can be achieved through A* examples for your exam board.
  4. Get creative with activities which reinforce and aid exploration of the text, such as drama activities, art, creative writing and media.

All of these tips and the extract below have been applied to the ZigZag Education Lord of the Flies Gifted and Talented Pack for GCSE. To preview and order, go to http://zzed.co.uk/WE21

Available as a photocopy master with site licence (£74): also available as a printable PDF file (£74+30%+vat) and an editable Word file (£74+50%+vat).

Please reference WE21 when placing your order to receive free postage & packaging.

ZigZag Education, Unit 3, Greenway Business Centre, Doncaster Road, Bristol BS10 5PY | Tel: 0117 950 3199 | Fax: 0117 959 1695

How often will your students change jobs?

What is the most effective way of preparing your students for the world of work?

The average person stays in each permanent job he/she gets for four years. If we include the temporary and part time jobs that a person might take during a time of recession (of the type we have been experiencing), then the average person will stay in each job for an average of two years.

This is a staggering turn around in the job market when compared with the past, and is due to three factors:

  1. The ease with which employers can remove employees in the first year of employment.
  2. The years of recession which has caused many employers to take on staff on short-term and zero hours contracts.
  3. A growth in the, “I don’t have to put up with this”. attitude from some young people who expect work to be, well, more like a social event than work, and who sometimes also lack the ability to handle the basic courtesies that employers who have been in the job for 30 years will demand and expect.

Whether our society will now return to the previous norm of four years per job is hard to say. But even if we do, there is still the fact that the average employee will change jobs 12 or more times during a career.

So, getting used to the experience of moving into a new work environment is no bad thing – and the sooner young people have that experience the better.

The trouble is that good work experiences for students need organising from the start to the finish, and many is the employer who complains that the work experience students they had were simply not prepared for work.

This is where “The Work Experience Manual” comes in, smoothing out the bumps that can occur as the school, the student and the workplace begin to interact.

The volume, which is supplied in copiable format, includes information on finding placements, liaising with the company in a way that the company finds suitable, student notes which allow those going on placements to be properly prepared, a record book showing the placement’s activities, and a wide range of actions and activities that should be considered after the work experience is over.

Overall the aim is to make the activity beneficial and enjoyable for the student and a positive experience for the school and employer. When this happens, everyone benefits.

The copyright licence allows the copying from either the book or the CD, so that all students can have pages relevant to their study at any time. It is also possible to place the CD on the school’s learning platform, so that students may access it at any time.

Order code T1822emn ISBN: 978 1 86083 866 8

Price:

  • £24.95 for the book or CD, plus £3.95 postage.
  • £31.94 for the book plus CD, plus £3.95 postage.

You can order in four different ways. In each case please quote our reference T1822emn. Sample pages and a contents list can be viewed prior to ordering on http://www.pdf.firstandbest.co.uk/careers/T1822.pdf

 

 

Overcoming the reluctance of some students to engage in independent study

Students who achieve higher grades often tend to be more self-directed and thus have the focus to spend time learning independently outside the classroom.

However, many students struggle in this area, and simply telling them to do a bit more studying outside schools hours doesn’t really help them at all.

So how can students be taught to take responsibility for their own learning?

The answer must lie in directing their learning to exactly the right area so that the student is never attempting to learn something without first having the basic pre-requisite knowledge.

If we then add elements of fun and competition to the self-directed learning, the students’ perspective of their work changes radically. They are encouraged by their success and become less likely to claim that the subject matter is boring.

These are the tenets upon which the SAM Learning approach has been built. What’s more, given that 60% of all work done on SAM Learning is completed outside school hours, it becomes clear that students with access to the system are indeed choosing to log in during their own free time.

Better still, a recent survey of 35,000 students who use SAM Learning revealed that 83% enjoy using the service.

You can read more about SAM Learning as a method of developing independent study at www.samlearning.com/independentlearning. Alternatively you can call us on 0845 130 4160 for more information.

Naturally we have checked with schools that are using the SAM Learning system to see what they think about the notion of independent learning.

Here are some comments that we received:

SAM Learning has helped transform our learning culture“.
Paul Hughes, Headmaster, St. Joseph’s School

You know straight away how you’ve done rather than waiting for the teacher to mark homework“.
Year 11 Student, Garibaldi College

SAM Learning gives them that element of independence“.
Stephanie Wood, Head of MFL, Stoke Park School