Students will engage in a comprehensive exploration of texts, emphasising reading comprehension, critical thinking and effective writing. The course integrates diverse genres to provide a dynamic and enriching learning experience. This course is tailored to prepare students for the Selective High Schools Placement Test as well as scholarship tests.
Course objectives
Vocabulary is included in most weeks. Homework includes a writing task that is teacher-marked, and other activities that are self-marked. There is no homework in week 10.
Week 1: Inferencing emotions, narrative plot structure: Freytag’s Pyramid, narrative hooks, text analysis, paired texts comprehension
Week 2: Linked extracts, narrative focus: the unreliable narrator, reading comprehension, text analysis
Week 3: Identifying the main idea, cloze – subheadings and sentence gap-match, persuasive writing structure, writing objective arguments
Week 4: Reviews: structure, compare-and-contrast text analysis, linked extracts, cloze – subheadings and sentence gap-match
Week 5: Poetry: sensory imagery, poetry comprehension, personal recount, text analysis
Week 6: Word fill-in-the-blanks, linked extracts, narrative setting, narrative orientation, sensory imagery, text analysis
Week 7: Word fill-in-the-blanks, poetry comprehension, linked extracts, formal letter, refutation, text analysis
Week 8: Literary techniques & devices, tone, poetry comprehension, persuasive writing: triangle of rhetoric, advertisements, compare-and-contrast text analysis
Week 9: Reading and writing assessments & review
Week 10: Idioms & other vocabulary fun, identifying the moral of a story, differentiating between theme and moral, text analysis