Dreaming Spires Revision

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...

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...

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) ...

This crammer course is now available as an eight-lesson self-paced guide. Get all the tips and tricks for tackling CIE's 0500 iGCSE English Language exams, question by question. The live webinar courses will still run in Easter times as usual, where I also give students individualised support and mark their work, but in the meantime, you can buy my methods in a short booklet and get started ahead of time. This guide covers the current syllabus that changed June 2015, but only support Higher Tier candidates. Click on the link to get your copy today , either as an ebook or as a print-on-demand paperback copy.

Now that the January crammer course has kicked off on Tuesdays at noon, registration for it is now closed. BUT WAIT!!! We're running another Easter crammer for 8 days from 21st March to 1st April, 2016, meeting at 9 am daily. We won't meeting Good Friday or Easter Monday. As always, this crammer course is online, and focuses specifically on the tips and tricks of successful exam techniques for the CIE 0500 iGCSE English Language exam that I've learned by being an examiner. Register on the registration tab for your child's place today!

I can't believe I've agreed to examine for CIE again this autumn, but here I am, slogging away at A1, A2, A3 ... √√√√ ... exp ... dev ... all this little weird symbols that examiners put into the margins of scripts to indicate good practice. The reason for doing this has nothing to do with money (examiners get paid pittance per script for the time it takes), but because I want to make sure that my advice to candidates on my crammer course is solid, up-to-date, and best of all, inside knowledge. Dreaming Spires Revision offers inside knowledge to home-educated students for the 0500 exam If you want the best supplier of tips and tricks for your money, then you will want to sign up with me at Dreaming Spires Revision right now: I take only 15 students per course, and I'm nearly full before it's even December. The tuition fee of £75 for 9 sessions includes marking a mock exam -- most tutors charge upwards of £25 per paper for this service, if they agree to do it ...

It’s a fact of life: examiners for your precious and important work are expected to mark about 350 papers over the course of about a month. The exam boards estimate that this will take about 87 hours (4 papers per hour); however, examiners are paid by the paper, so it’s in their best interest to mark faster. Five-Minute Treatment Think about it: the exam that you sweated over, stressed about, and prepared for is passing through an examiner’s hands in 15 minutes.  For the reading paper, that’s 3 questions’ worth of work, giving the examiner a total of 5 minutes’ concentrated effort per answer. But wait: that’s not all! Starting this year, the English language papers are going to be marked in on-line form, rather than in paper form. Personally, I dread to think of this, because studies have shown that people are able to read much less carefully when something is on-line than when it’s in paper form (see the book called  The Shallows  by Nicholas Carr about this...