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The marks for week 110 are attached below, well done everyone!
The top 5, in no particular order, are: Evelyn, Yutong, Julia L, Jasmine, Gordon
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B3q8gCCXeI2hhbbbQVrxoloudVfqKLN8
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The marks for week 109 are attached below, well done everyone!
The top 5, in no particular order, are: Evelyn, sophy, zimo, DZ, edward
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15zPO4gJid-rNde3gG_Z3qrrkjBc5yosW
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Here are those ICAS papers that are good for practicing multiple choice (and speedy comprehension in general). Have a look at them, the answers are always on the final page of the PDF. It’s 7-10 mins per comprehension text + answers so you have to do around an answer per minute (if not less when you factor in reading time)! Don’t worry, the 11+ is never that tight on time but can be really good practice to try some of these out in timed conditions 🙂
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Here are those ICAS papers that are good for practicing multiple choice (and speedy comprehension in general). Have a look at them, the answers are always on the final page of the PDF. It’s 7-10 mins per comprehension text + answers so you have to do around an answer per minute (if not less when you factor in reading time)! Don’t worry, the 11+ is never that tight on time but can be really good practice to try some of these out in timed conditions 🙂
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For Week 76,you should try your best to recite and write down the selected piece from Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee(Adapted from Highgate’s 11+ Entry Examination Exemplar)
Laurie Lee was a British writer who, in 1959, wrote an account of his childhood in a
country village.
In this extract, he is only three years old. He is arriving with his family at the village
for the first time. At the start of this extract he has accidentally fallen from the cart in
which they are travelling into a field of high grass.
I was set down from the cart at the age of three, and there with a sense of
bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never
been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade
tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green,
thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt
through the air like monkeys.
I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground,
rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in
the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy
suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were
tearing apart.
For the first time in my life, I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in my
life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict nor fathom: a
world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without
warning. I was lost and did not expect to be found again. I put back my head and
howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully.
From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many other, by the appearance
of my sisters. They came scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank, and parting
the long grass found me. Faces of rose, familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up
like shields between me and the sky; faces with grins and white teeth, bashing off
terror with their broad scoldings and affections. They leaned over me – one, two,
three – their mouths smeared with red currents and their hands dripping with juice.
“There, there, it’s all right, don’t you wail any more. Come down ‘ome and we’ll stuff
you with currents.”
And Marjorie, the eldest, lifted me into her long brown hair and ran me jogging down
the path and through the steep rose-filled garden, and set me down on the cottage
doorstep, which was our home, though I couldn’t believe it. -
Well done this week! Top 5: Yao, Dudu, Zimo, Johnny and Eva.
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LDmsvYQfAT5NRoKFc-diubS73lRDjRwO
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For Week 66, you should try your best to recite and write down the selected piece from
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.
Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?
So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast.
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For Week 61, you should try your best to recite and write down the selected piece from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes – just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor – an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.”
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For Week 56, you should try your best to recite and write down the selected piece from
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.“In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half, hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello.
It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles.
There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen’s dwellings – at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows.”
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Summary for Lesson 29: Writer’s Workshop
In today’s lesson we consolidated our work over the last eight weeks, completing a writer’s workshop in which the students got to test out and practice the skills they have been honing for the first half of our famous authors course. The class began with a vocab test which they completed brilliantly- with each student scoring highly and coming up with impressive answers. We then moved on to revising the core components of our eight authors, with the students beautifully identifying the most important themes and forms of their writing. Each student then chose one author to emulate and wrote some really fantastic pieces in the style of their chosen author, working with character creation and plot twists. Fantastic work today everyone- I was impressed by the creativity and inspiration you demonstrated throughout our class today. Keep up the amazing work! 🙂
How to write like… (to help with revision)
Shakespeare: https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/mar/14/how-to-write-like-william-shakespeare
Dickens: https://www.writersdigest.com/there-are-no-rules/write-like-charles-dickens
Fitzgerald: https://nicolebianchi.com/3-tips-fitzgerald-for-writing-masterful-dialogue/
Austen: https://howtowritelike.com/2019/04/04/how-to-write-like-jane-austen/
Hemingway: https://getfreewrite.com/blogs/writing-success/how-to-write-like-hemingway
Zusak: https://www.ignitedinkwriting.com/ignite-your-ink-blog-for-writers/read-the-book-thief-by-markus-zusak/2017
Rowling: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/five-great-writing-tips-from-j-k-rowling/
Christie: https://www.writerswrite.co.za/7-excellent-plotting-tips-from-agatha-christie/#:~:text=Agatha%20Christie%20found%20her%20ideas,to%20develop%2C%20and%20take%20notes.
Video from the lesson on writing tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flthk8SNiiE&list=PLJicmE8fK0Eib5y-bh4RVFvg492OIwpg8&index=20
Video on plot twists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SPcBeLZmiQ
Homework attached .
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For Week 51, you should try your best to recite and write down the selected piece from Why I Write by George Orwell.By clicking Why I Write link you can view the full essay.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful business men – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
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For Week 46, you should try your best to recite and write down the selected piece from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
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Physics 1: Physical Laws – Summary
Today, students were introduced to the hierarchy of knowledge in physics – how everyday objects can be explained and their behaviours predicted by physical formulas. We then explored one of the fundamental physical laws, gravity, and misconceptions about weight vs mass on different planets. Finally, we investigated Newton’s contribution to our understanding of acceleration due to gravity through his formula F = m*a.Here are my suggestions for videos for extension :
Home work for Lesson 1:
https://forms.gle/KCMYd4dvdqHHJ67a6
For those who wish to prepare for next week where we will discuss the particle model of matter, this video introduces atomic theory:
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For Week 41, you should try your best to recite and write down below piece from Oliver Twist.
It was a very dirty place. The rooms upstairs had great high wooden chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways. From all of these tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome: dismal and dreary as it looked now.
Spiders had built their webs in the angles of the walls and ceilings; and sometimes, when Oliver walked softly into a room, the mice would scamper across the floor, and run back terrified to their holes. With these exceptions, there was neither sight nor sound of any living thing; and often, when it grew dark, and he was tired of wandering from room to room, he would crouch in the corner of the passage by the street-door, to be as near living people as he could; and would remain there, listening and counting the hours, until the Jew or the boys returned.
In all the rooms, the mouldering shutters were fast closed: the bars which held them were screwed tight into the wood; the only light which was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top: which made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange shadows. There was a back-garret window with rusty bars outside, which had no shutter; and out of this, Oliver often gazed with a melancholy face for hours together; but nothing was to be descried from it but a confused and crowded mass of housetops, blackened chimneys, and gable-ends. Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head might be seen, peering over the parapet-wall of a distant house; but it was quickly withdrawn again; and as the window of Oliver’s observatory was nailed down, and dimmed with the rain and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make out the forms of the different objects beyond, without making any attempt to be seen or heard,—which he had as much chance of being, as if he had lived inside the ball of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
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For Week 35, you should try your best to recite and write down Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech transcript .
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character; l have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers; I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted every hill and mountain shall be made low, and rough places will be made plane and crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
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