Dreaming Spires Revision

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...

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...

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...

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) ...

With CIE, there are variations on the English Language exam, so it's important for successful revision that you KNOW YOUR VERSION. This guy hasn't got a clue -- have you? First of all, it's very simple to say, but are you sure which exam you're sitting? My blog posts will be about the CIE English Language iGCSE 0500 exam, higher tier. Are you doing Higher Tier, or Foundation? Both of these exams take the third paper, sometimes known as the "writing exam" where you will be graded on skills like story-writing or description, and will be designated by a 3 at the end, such as 31 or 32 or 33. If you're doing Higher Tier, then you also are sitting the second paper, sometimes known as the "reading exam". This one comes in three sections, the third of which comes in two parts, and this one will be called 21 or 22 or 23. Foundation Tier has a "reading exam", too, but it has more guidance in its answers, and will be designated by...