Keep Calm and Teach English

Summarising involves taking the main ideas from a piece of text and rewriting them in your own words.   The ability to summarise a text is an important reading and studying skill as it can show that you have really understood the text and that you have identified its main points and ideas. It is also an essential writing skill as it requires the presentation of these ideas in your own words. The following Graphic Organiser can help your students when working with short stories or narratives. Summarising Graphic Organiser

Every teacher knows the struggle of how to capture the students' interest at the beginning of a lesson. Engaging them into their own learning can prove to be even more difficult. One way is to use a KWL chart. In my lesson about Sherlock Holmes I used such a chart as a pre-reading activity. A KWL chart is a graphical organizer designed to help in learning. The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students already K now, what they  W ant to know, and what they ultimately L earn in the course of the lesson. A KWL chart consists of three columns and it is very simple to design and use. However it is a very powerful tool as it motivates and engages students from the very start. First, a KWL chart activates students' prior knowledge of the topic to be studied. Next, it sets a purpose for the lesson: students are able to add their own input to the topic by contemplating what they actually want to know. Using a KWL chart allows students to expand their ideas beyond the text us...