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...

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 ...