Dreaming Spires Revision

I'm really happy to announce that Yvonne Mason, my colleague at Dreaming Spires Home Learning , is joining the revision team for offering short courses over Easter to help hone a student's skills for their English Language IGCSE. Meeting up in Autumn Just like the CAIE course that I've run for almost a decade, Yvonne's course will go through past papers and suggest best practice, sharing tips, giving warnings of places where students often trip up. She won't, however, mark any mocks like I do for the CAIE due to time constraints this year. We can make suggestions as to someone who will mark mocks for you instead if you so wish. Both courses - my CAIE and her Edexcel - will run live, online daily during the Easter holidays starting the 15th of April. Hers will meet at 6 pm and mine at 7 pm. If this is something you want for your teen, then don't delay: we have a limited number of spaces and they're likely to fill up fast. To register for...

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)

We're just two days away from the Autumn sittings for the CIE English Language IGCSE exam, and I'm already looking ahead to Spring by opening up registrations for the LIVE AND ONLINE weekly January course as well as the daily Easter crammer to help students prepare for their exams for the summer of 2018. Dreaming Spires Revision time??? I'm so excited!!!! We'll be looking at the summer exams from last year, and taking advantage of my years of experience with this exam and what examiners are looking for.  So why slog through reinventing the wheel when I can point your teens to exactly the way to focus on each question, AND mark a mock for them to help them see where they can revise more efficiently? This course is delivered live and online, and is open to students from all over the world. We regularly have people attend from New Zealand, India, Singapore, and throughout Europe. If the weekly course doesn't suit your time zone, then let me know that...

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...

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...

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...

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) ...

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...

Hey, everybody -- if you have a student who is doing the CIE iGCSE 0500 English Language exam in the near future (that's the higher tier option), then you'll want to get on board the raffle for a free copy of my revision guide. If you're not doing it, could you please share this giveaway on your social media?  The link below will take you to the giveaway site and tell you what you need to do, or go to our Facebook page to enter it from there:  https://www.facebook.com/dreamingspiresrevision/app/228910107186452/ a Rafflecopter giveaway

I'm a current examiner for CIE and find myself with a few spare days over half term when I could mark some CIE English Language iGCSE 0500 (higher tier) mock exams. How would you like me to mark your child's practice papers so you can get some encouragement and last-minute tips? Well, this is one of those rare chances! Costs are £20 for one paper (that is, Paper 2 or Paper 3), or £30 for 2 papers (could be 2 x Paper 2, or 2 x Paper 3, or one each of Paper 2 and Paper 3). NOTE: I don't mark Paper 1. The only limitations are: Your child is taking the exam THIS autumn (if you're taking it in the Spring, please wait) Only a maximum of two papers per student You can choose which papers you sit as long as they're summer 2015 or later.  Don't submit any papers that the student has already practised, or the results will be skewed. Check Xtreme Papers for numerous versions you could use. Contact me on the blogger form ASAP to receive further details, ...

Returning for January 2017, the weekly crammer course is making an appearance again. Running on Mondays at 1 pm from the 16th of January, it spreads the 8 sessions over a longer period of time. We're also running the Easter crammer as usual -- eight straight days starting the 10th of April, at 7:30 pm. Either one is £80 to get tutored in person by the author who wrote the book "How to Ace the CIE iGCSE English Language exam." The basis for both it and the Easter crammer will be last summer's exam, so if you're revising on your own already, you might want to avoid doing that one so you come to it fresh.

STOP PRESS! STOP PRESS! Due to overwhelming requests, the August crammer that starts the 22nd is meeting at 2 pm instead of 7 pm. Remember that this is 8 days in a row, starting the 22nd and finishing the 31st. If you or someone you know is sitting the CIE English Language iGCSE 0500 (Higher Tier), please register ASAP for the last few places.