GCSE REVISION

Getting back to the text

Students probably remember the gist of a poem – though revising this might be a good place to start – but will in all likelihood be much vaguer when it comes to recalling any of the actual text. They obviously don’t need to know the poems off by heart but they do need to be familiar with the words on the page. As with relatives, teachers or classmates, like them or loath them, they need to get along with them and know their little ways.

Here are some approaches which help with that:

  • Re-sequencing
  • Untangling
  • Decoding
  • Digging for gold

Re-sequencing

I’ve recommended muddled up or de-sequenced texts elsewhere on the site. Trying to restore order to such a text is a very good way of ensuring that it is looked at very closely. Try it yourself and you’ll see. For a quick fix, copy your poem into Word, go to Table > Sort and click OK. It will de-sequence your poem by arranging it in the order of the first letter of each line. Just like that! For a worksheet approach, just print it out. (If you’re patient and willing to handle the logistics, print onto slightly thicker paper and cut it into lines for students to reassemble. Do it at this stage and they can’t just try to match the scissor cuts!)

If you have ICT available, students can use Word to re-sequence the text. A neat keyboard shortcut here is:

  • position the cursor in the line you want to move,
  • hold down Shift and Alt, and
  • use the Up/Down cursor (arrow) keys at the same time.

If using an interactive whiteboard, try View > Outline and then, having selected a line, use the little blue up/down arrows on the new toolbar to move the line up or down. Remember, toolbars can be moved about the screen (‘torn off’ at the perforations on their extreme left) and positioned where they are convenient.

I would give students ten minutes to look at a paper copy of the de-sequenced poem in pairs and mark it with any ideas as to its order. Then go round the room, taking suggestions as you work with the IWB version.

Untangling

This is a similar process but one where you interlink two different poems. If you leave them in their correct order, it’s not too difficult and can be a nice easy starter. If you have the lines interwoven and de-sequenced, it’s much harder. These inds of activities are best done in pairs as the talk involved in working out how to solve the puzzle is where much of the learning takes place.

De-coding

If you have a word processed version of any text, you can create a version of it in code fairly quickly. Then students can try to crack the code and in the process get really close to the text. You need Word to create the coded text but then print it out and let students solve it on paper. Some dos and don’ts:

  • Make sure it’s all upper or all lower case.
  • Punctuation marks are converted to code too – so decide whether to leave them in or take them out. You could rensert them with a pen on your print-out before photocopying.
  • Leave plenty of space between lines.
  • Make sure that the word processor hasn’t broken a word in the middle at the end of a line. It won’t be using word-wrap because as far as it’s concerned, these aren’t words!

Depending on the ability of students, or the time available, give some clues to get them started.

Digging for gold

This requires a digital projector (though you don’t need an interactive whiteboard if you haven’t got one or it’s not working).

Copy you poem into Word, select all of it and then go to the font colour menu. Choose white. The text will disappear. Set your highlighter pen to black. Now a double click anywhere in the text will reveal a word – perfect for investigating and predicting. Double click again to hide it once more. I have played this as a team game with students competing to predict the next word of a line; you can come up with variations on that theme.

© 2008