Y9-10+English+(AS)


 * WELCOME - HAERE MAI**

My name is Anne Stead and I am passionate about teaching and learning with my hard-working 2010 Y9-10 class. Together we are exploring how novels and poems work, creating cameos and explaining topics. How does this happen?

In Term 1 we started outside the classroom - three 15-minute mini-field trips. We sat by the swimming pool noting colours, sounds, smells, and textures, background and close-up. Back in class we used our field notes to create a cameo - a short, vivid description of the scene, taking the reader there through the senses. We did the same under the grove of trees by the admin block - looking, listening, breathing in and touching, to again take the reader there. On the third trip we worked in trios. Each trio had an empty wooden picture frame. They chose a focal spot senior yard, held the frame so the rest of us could look through it, and verbally described what they saw within the frame. This taught us about perspective, foreground, background, landscape and portrait. These small expeditions set the scene for creative writing during the year.

Back in the classroom we explored the vocabulary of the senses - colours, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes - and of perspective - foreground, background, landscape and portrait, long shot and close-up. We looked up and recorded definitions in the dictionary, especially all the colours (who knew there were so many greens?). We learned the list of 25 key words for use later in the year - like maths or science facts!

Since then we have motored through some pretty intense stuff. We learned how to do explanation writing - explaining how things or processes work. We had great resources all around the walls - big charts, diagrams and text about a wide range of topics - eg how racing cars, volcanos, and i-pods work, how identity theft happens, how pounamu evolves and plastic water bottles are made. We studied extracts from the novels The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera and Canoe in the Mist by Elsie Locke (set in the Tarawera eruption of June 1886). After analysing how these powerful descriptions worked, we defined and recorded more lists to learn. Then we found out how a whole novel works and in June started applying what we learned to our own projects on Whale Rider. We negotiated as a class how the project would work, what the choices were, and how it would be marked. At the start of Term 3 students will enter their projects on their individual wiki pages, and then some creative cameo writing using the skills we learned in Term 1. We hope you enjoy it!

This year we have two mixed Y9-10 English classes.