Congratulations!

First up, congratulations for checking the blog! My plan is to update this every couple of days with handy tips and ideas to help you with your revision over the holidays.

If you have any questions or queries about your revision (or indeed recipes for the perfect Christmas turkey), you can post them as comments and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Today's revision idea: Grab a copy of the Metro (other newspapers allowed!), choose any article which interests you and answer the following 8 mark question in 15 minutes:

How does the writer show his thoughts and feelings in the article?

Post your response as a comment and I'll mark it and give you feedback.

One more thought for today which is taken from Steve Jobs' (founder of Apple) biography. In 2011, Jobs was dying of cancer and met with Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) to talk about their careers. They got to talking about learning and discussed the following:

"Jobs asked some questions about education and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools of the future would be like, with students watching video lessons on their own then using class time for discussion and problem solving."

If two of the greatest and most creative minds in our lifetime think it's a good idea, who am I to argue! Feel free to also post any of your thoughts on this quote...

Happy holidays!

Tuesday 18th December

Objective: To learn to create an accurate and original piece of descriptive writing

Task 1: On the previous post, copy and paste your comparison from last week as a comment. Remember to select "Name/URL" from the drop down list and to enter your name before posting

Task 2: Complete the Question 5 task which we began last lesson:

The travel section of your local newspaper is inviting readers to write about their favourite place.

Write a letter to the editor describing a favourite place you know and explaining why others would like it.

Focus on meeting the following objectives:

1) Varied sentence structure

2) Sophisticated vocabulary

3) Creative and original answer

The following videos will help you:

Homework due by Thursday

Read all of the comments on this post and the previous one and, for each post, write a comment explaining which answer you think is best and why.