Dreaming Spires Revision

Students wanted a longer holiday, so we've compromised: we're now starting the crammer on the 4th of September and will run it for just four days, from 2-4 pm daily. I blame it on CIE for scheduling the exam so early this Autumn, but it is the last one of the current spec, so probably safest exam to take in the foreseeable future in terms of track record of past papers and examiners knowing how to mark it. Let me show you the way to go! (PS This isn't me in the photo, but it is my son and my dog)

Students are making a hash of this question, probably over-thinking it. They can also under-think it ... by not reading the question! Almost every time, Question 3 on Paper 2 wants a list based off the insert that has been GENERALISED from the specific example in the insert. Many years ago, candidates were asked to read the insert and pick out points about characteristics of fictional detectives. Another one was about difficulties and obstacles to building the Panama Canal. Another one was about declining bee populations, and still another about Houdini. I've just been marking mock exams where the insert was about Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, but the question wanted to know what was the allure of Wild West shows in general. So where students were saying who Buffalo Bill was, and that his show once played for Queen Victoria, they weren't answering the question about how these shows in general were capturing imaginations of the populace: details lik...

Come enter the Rafflecopter giveaway of a FREE paperback copy of my exam revision guide for the CIE 0500 English Language IGCSE exam. This guide will walk your student through each question on the higher-tier papers, giving tips, tricks, short-cuts, and advice, while also warning of pitfalls to avoid. Enter as often as you like - no string attached! Use this link:  http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/85f3ef824/?

Do you feel stressed about the CIE 0500 English Language exam that's coming up this Autumn? Come along to our daily crammer and get all the strategies to make you feel more prepared, focused, and confident. After taking Dr P's crammer course, "Wilfred" felt in control. Now taking student registrations for the daily course that's starting 2nd of October,  meeting at 8 am because nobody has anything planned then but a few extra zzzzzzs!!! What: Dreaming Spires Revision crammer course for CIE 0500 IGCSE in English Language (higher tier) Where: On your computer - it's live and online When: 2nd-6th, and 9th and 10th October, 8 am daily. Cost: £80 including mocking a mark exam (2 papers) How: Register here to receive details of sending payment Who: Only 20 of you, so don't miss the chance to get live tuition from Dr P, author of "How to Ace the English Language IGCSE" , available on ebook and paperback from Amazon.

Usually, I think descriptive questions in Paper 3 of the CIE 0500 IGCSE are easier than narrative questions, but this year was an exception. I thought they were rather difficult, and invited narrative approaches which, of course, would limit a student's success on it. Earlier this summer, I was discussing this in a private Skype with one of my students, and we decided to have a challenge. Each of us would write our version of the descriptive piece based on the actual exam question. His parents joined in, too. Here are the results of that little game that we played, published on the  Facebook Page.    In the next post, I'm going to try to tease out the process I used for tackling a hard descriptive question like this, and make some systematic suggestions should this trend for vague and narrative continue. Enjoy! PS Why not respond in a comment with YOUR descriptive answer, or pop over to the FB page and add yours there? It would be fun! FROM FB PAGE: Her...

Ever wondered which were the most straightforward, confidence-boosting CIE IGCSE 0500 English Language exam papers to choose from all the options out there? Well, my answer is ... THESE! There's a light at the end of the tunnel! If you're looking for a last set of mock papers to try that won't crush any confidence that was starting to emerge at this late stage, then look at these two papers. One of them is a Paper 2 from October/November 2015, and the other is Paper 3 from November 2016. Here's a link to the papers: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qMpLJGZEzKi5owTFq1NjkvHDMbyVwSHM?usp=sharing  Just remember: BREATHE! I mean, literally: breathe! It will get oxygen going to your brain, and you'll think more clearly.

No matter how many times I teach my crammer students that a certain CIE question is best answered with five distinct steps, they will still insist on doing the steps out of order or leaving some of them out. Today, my son helped me make a video to stress the importance of doing things in the right order. You can find it at this link here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZUG4GKkdEk If there's a recipe, follow the steps in the right order At the risk of over-explaining the video, I'm going to describe what's happening in it. (The time-lapse feature means sometimes it's hard to follow) First, he tries to make porridge by putting the bowl in the microwave -- empty! Then he puts in the milk, and while I'm getting the oats, he also adds honey. I give him a fresh bowl, and he pours all the oats into the bowl. I mean, ALL the oats! So, we take oats back out and pour in only the right amount. (This is important for the specific question, which wants only ...

I'm a huge believer in routines, just for life and living in general. However, when it comes to academics in our household, routine is one of our foundational principles. Regular times for school help concentration This is partly because we are followers of the Charlotte Mason method, and Miss Mason's motto was "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life." In other words, she includes routine - or "discipline" - in the very basis of her educational theories, and I've found that a regular routine of working on academics together in our home school has a huge impact on our successes or our relative failures. When we sit down to read our books together every day at 10 am, but kids come ready to learn, to concentrate, to discuss, and to focus. If we fall out of this routine, the kids really struggle to learn on the same level. They get a bit silly, they interrupt, they're distracted. We lose the thread of our books and have to review thing...

Getting that good night’s sleep the night before an exam — impossible, right? Well, here are some ideas that might help. It looks so easy, doesn't it? One of the things that will help get to sleep is eating foods that contain the amino acid tryptophan, since these will in turn help your body manufacture the sleep hormone, melatonin. These include dairy products like cheese, yoghurt, milk, as well as nuts, seeds, meat, and even tofu. On the other hand, bright flashing lights and back-lit screens from television, tablets, and other electronic devices have been shown to suppress melatonin production. They emit "blue light" which your brain interprets as daylight, so turning these off nice and early - say, 5 pm - would be a good idea if you’re wanting to get to sleep early. Electronics can inhibit sleep hormones To my mind, though, one of the key things to do is start a regular bedtime routine in the month before the exam period. It doesn't take l...

Here's a question that was recently posed on one of the exam chat boards: what's the best pen to use for the exams. Beautiful but not really practical! With the English Language exam, it's really important that you have a a nice strong line with a fine nib and no bleed through. I've just been marking my crammer students' mocks, and those with a weak line are very hard to read. This will necessarily hurt a student's grade, because much of what an examiner is looking for is fluency of expression. If instead he/she is having to decipher each word, the fluidity of the sentence is compromised. On the other hand, a pen that bleeds through is equally bad. Exam scripts are now scanned into a computer for examiners to mark on the screen, and if a student has bleed-through on the script, it's also really hard to read (and they're hard enough on the computer as it is!). Basically, the more clarity with a student's answers in terms of handwriting a...

If I had only one tip to give a student, it would be this one: read the question ! Even though I give my revision students a mantra about remembering to read questions carefully, they will still create or manufacture their own version of what the question is asking, and thus, end up NOT answering the question at all. Just a slight alteration to the starting point can mean you miss the goal entirely! It happens all the time in the exam. The question can be about an early morning stroll through the town, but students will write instead about what it's like at night, or what it's like to walk into the country from the city, or write about the city in two different seasons. Or, it can ask what a father should do about his child's experience at school, but the answer is turned into a diatribe against modern educational practices. For an exam that tallies 50 out of 100 marks for how well you can read, it would make sense to avoid sabotaging your grade by breezing over...

When I mark exams, I have to be honest that I like to start with the last question and work my way back to Question 1, whether it's the reading or the writing paper. I'm not sure why I like to do this. I think it's because all the other questions are more cut-and-dried or enjoyable, while the Question 1s sometimes feel like nails on a chalkboard to me. For the exam candidate, there are some good reasons for freeing yourself from the normal conventions. In the reading paper, for example, that Question 3 listing is something you can do in a fairly short time frame, and the subsequent summary should be churned out just as fast as you can write. Free yourself from convention Both these parts of Question 3 get easier and faster the more you practise them, so I just keeping thinking: why not grab some quick points in a short time frame, and leave yourself to ponder the more laborious Question 1 with some points already in the bag? There are more complex and detailed ...

I don't know why students don't want to use the bullet points available to them on Question 1 on Paper 2, but I can assure you, they're there for a reason. These three bullet points are your friends! Three's the magic number on Question 1 Use each one of the bullet points as a paragraph with information that comes from the insert. It may mean you have to search throughout the insert for what to include in each of the bullet points, but that will only show off your ability to re-organise your thoughts. In the main, these bullet points are generally asking the same three things: What are some of the obvious things in the insert that show your comprehension is good? What are some of the implications of details, ie, how well do you read between the lines? Often this will include someone's thoughts and feelings, perhaps based on another character's actions and behaviours. All four of these items - thoughts, feelings, actions, behaviours - should be add...

Another common question I get asked is about how many mock papers a student should do in preparation for the exam. Work, work, work ... but best? The answer is slightly complicated by the need to practise questions vs practising a whole paper. Ever since CIE changed its spec starting June 2015, the papers before then aren't very useful for taking as a complete mock. However, they still offer a number of great opportunities to practise certain skills that you find in the current style of exam. For example, I think it's great to do a lot of practice with the old Question 3s from Paper 2. There won't be 15 facts to find as there are in the current papers - maybe only 7 or 8 -- but practising the skill of identifying "salient facts" continues to be relevant, and not just for Question 3, but even for Question 1. I know you'll probably want to do some Question 3s for the new spec, too, though, so how do you choose which ones to do only in part, and whi...

The CIE English exam cares about your punctuation, spelling, grammar, and sentence structures - not as much as it used to, but enough that you need to spend time revising these aspects of your skills. A lot of people try to do this via workbooks, short answer, quizzes, and exercises, but I think the best way to cover all these aspects of "mechanics" is something called "copywork". I still do copywork, too! Essentially, copywork is taking a classic book like The Hobbit or A Tale of Two Cities or something poetic like selections from Hardy or Frost, and copying their words - word by word, comma by comma - for ten to fifteen minutes a day. It's not a quick-fix by any means, but an organic process that will strengthen all your writing skills in one activity. One of the ways it works is that it forces you to pay close attention to the words that you're copying. If, for example, you were to copy just the sentence I wrote before this, you would probab...

Here's another question that's asked frequently on the various home-education boards on Facebook: which iGCSE board should you use, CIE or Edexcel? The truth of the matter is that most people don't have a choice - you have to choose the board that's offered at your nearby exam centres. If your exam centre offers both, then you will need to weigh up the style of exam, learning style of your teen, exam dates, and other factors to make your decision. For example, these exams vary in how long each session is for taking the papers. CIE's exam is two different papers at 2 hours each. Edexcel has two options: Spec A which is also 2 papers but of 2 hours 15 and 1 hour 30, and part of this Spec requires knowledge and preparation of an anthology beforehand, whereas Spec B has no anthology but is a single paper of 3 hours' duration. Second, CIE changed its spec back in June 2015, so it isn't due any overhaul or alteration in the near future, whereas Edexcel is go...

Most students who register for my crammer courses have already been studying past papers with a fine-tooth comb. (See the Exam Tip about Finding Past Papers HERE .) It's not unusual to see students get burned out with this repetition. Plus, they sometimes feel that they stall in their studies and stop forward progress. Indeed, they even come to the correct conclusion that just cramming the paper over and over isn't enough for what they want to achieve. So, I'm often asked what else can they do to strengthen their skills in English that will be useful for the exam? Personally, I think this is letting the tail wag the dog. Gratuitous photo of a dog with a tail Performance-related testing is killing students' love, interest, and mastery of almost all subjects, leading them instead to prefer knowing just what's on the test and not bother about the transferable skills and life lessons one could get if one studied a subject properly. But I realise that'...

This may be one of the most frequently asked questions for people who are preparing to navigate the whole season of their children's lives where exams loom large. Quite frequently, parents will reason that English would be a good exam to do first. After all, it's the student's first language and they've been doing reading and writing for many years. However, most experienced home-educators and examiners advise that you hold off taking English. Why is that? A child who loves reading is preparing for exams, but not ready to take them. First of all, there are other exams with cut and dried answers, like maths, where you either know it or you don't, and these are easier to tackle in the earlier part of one's exam career. English, on the other hand, is essay-based, and this means that a student needs to be able to write fluently and with maturity, skills that are often "uncooked" in teens toward the thirteen-year-old end. Make no mistake: an e...

Welcome to Dreaming Spires Revision and the new series of exam tips I'm running for this year. If you're not sure who I am, my name is Dr Kat Patrick, a home-educator for more than a decade who is also a former secondary school teacher in English and examiner for the Cambridge International Board's 0500 English Language iGCSE exam. I run online crammer courses about three times a year to help coach students do their best on this exam, and have also written a revision guide that you can buy from Amazon at the link below: http://tinyurl.com/hr8bmyl On a recent Facebook discussion about UK exams, someone challenged me about why I often mention that my revision courses give tips and tricks that only a current examiner can know. The answer is simple: no matter how many past papers you download, how many mark schemes or examiner's reports you read, you'll never know the ins and outs of the way examining works unless you've been in those standardisation meet...

This may be an unnecessary post. You may know exactly where to get Past Papers for the CIE iGCSE English Language exam, but just in case, my go-to links for old papers are: http://papers.xtremepapers.com/CIE/Cambridge%20IGCSE/English%20-%20First%20Language%20(0500)/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzumkDfi9230MEF4T3FSemtmNWM Pointing you the right way Here are three things you need to know about past papers: 1) The Cambridge Board changed its "spec" or its style of questions back in June of 2015. This means any paper before that is not in the current style. 2) That being said, there are still sections of the old papers that are useful for practice. Particularly, the Question 2 on Paper 2 -- that's the one about analysing the language of a passage. That's still there in the new spec, unchanged. In Paper 3, the descriptive and narrative tasks are unchanged as well, and you can get a huge range of practice questions that would be helpful. 3) ...