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: Main idea summary, cloze – subheadings & sentence gap-match, narrative structure, science fiction genre, ‘show, don’t tell’, comparing orientations, text analysis
Week 2: Poetry – techniques and devices, paired poems comprehension, crafting engaging similes, narrative point-of-view, surprise endings
Week 3: Inferring character, fiction comprehension, cloze – word fill-in-the-blank, advertisements, the triangle of rhetoric, text analysis
Week 4: Linked extracts, persuasive writing, text coherence and cohesion, refutation, text analysis
Week 5: Reading mock test, formal letter: information letter, application letter & letter of complaint, formal & informal language
Week 6: Poetry analysis, parody, diary/journal writing, text analysis, parentheses
Week 7: Paired texts comprehension, linked extracts, cloze – word fill-in-the-blank, advice sheet structure, using subheadings and bullet lists, how to write a bullet list
Week 8: Cloze – sentence gap-match, reading comprehension & analysis, newspaper report text structure: the WHAT triangle, newspaper headlines, text analysis
Week 9: Reading and writing assessments & review, creative thinking, main idea summary
Week 10: Extended fiction comprehension and analysis, visual text analysis, flash fiction, quick writes