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Which novels are Australian high school English students studying?
This list is collected from online chats about children’s books studied in Australian high schools. Comments are from teachers who have used these books in class in 2020. Australian states and territories set quotas for the minimum amount of Australian content. In Victoria, for example, it’s a third. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas […]
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Writing Activity: Describe A Park Or Playground
They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road—having turned off the highway and then off a decent unpaved country road—and found a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. A sign was painted on a board and needed retouching: “caution. deep-holes.” Alice Munro, “Deep Holes“ Kenopsia: The […]
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Writing Activity: Describe The Theatre
People watching live theatre, people lined up waiting to watch live theatre, and backstage paintings.
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Writing Activity: Describe a Bathroom
Maurice Lobre – Cabinette de toilette de Jacques-Emile Blanche 1888
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Writing Activity: Describe A Church
A collection of churches for inspiration
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Writing Activity: Describe Medical Rooms and Hospitals
Medical rooms and hospitals are safe, infantalising, dangerous, creepy, life-saving, traumatising places, and I offer them here as examples of what Foucault called ‘heterotopia‘. The hospital’s ambiguous relationship to everyday social space has long been a central theme of hospital ethnography. Often, hospitals are presented either as isolated “islands’ defined by biomedical regulation of space […]
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Creative Writing Prompts from Photos
TIPS FOR USING IMAGES AS WRITING PROMPTS from @DoWise Go beyond the picture; use it as a stimuls; don’t be constrained by it. Start with a wide focus and then zoom in on specific details Flashback and then jump forward if it fits your narrative to do so Craft the way you start some of […]
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Conflict In The Kitchen
Cover by Jessie Willcox Smith; lower left bottom says H114; original is faded and watermarked; Bell, Louise Price, “Kitchen Fun- Teaches children to cook successfully”, Harter Publishing Co, Cleveland, Ohio, ©1932, 28 pages
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Writing Activity: Describe The Shops
A collection of illustrations of shops
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Poof and the Piglet
Poof and the Piglet is a homemade picture book written and illustrated by a 10-year-old who was given the title as inspiration. The 10-year-old has also been taught universal story structure. Poof is the star of an entire series of books. Sometimes she has a sidekick called Worm-hoop (an English owl). This time Worm-hoop is […]
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Poof and Worm-Hoop Part One
Poof The Old Lady is a graphic novel created by two neurodiverse ten-year-olds. The running gag is that an old lady by the name of Poof goes Poof! at the end of each story. But she comes alive before the next. The creators are best friends at school, and they both like to read and […]
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How to Create Conflict in Literature
Every interesting main character in every story needs a worthy opponent. The opponent makes the main character interesting. The main character learns through their opponent. The opponent attacks the main character’s great shortcoming. The main character deals with their own great shortcoming and grows as a result.
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The Secret To Russian Fudge
How to make Russian Fudge — a step-by-step guide for cooks with no sweet thermometer and no Edmonds Cookbook (which is only of limited help anyway). Googling has so far not helped me out on this one, so while Mum was staying at our place this week I had an extended lesson in how to […]
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Writing Activity: Describe A Living Room
As a writing exercise, describe your own living room, or the living room of someone you know. For inspiration, I offer the following examples from literature. EXAMPLE OF A LIVING ROOM DESCRIBED BY DAPHNE DU MAURIER We were all sitting in the long, low room at Farthings, darker than usual because of the rain. The […]
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Writing Activity: Describe A Classroom
Describe a classroom is the perfect writing activity for schools. Maybe you’re in a classroom right now. If so, you can write about that. If not, you can imagine any sort of classroom you like. It may be one classroom in particular, or it may be an amalgamation of several, or of all the classrooms you’ve ever set foot in. Or…