english@kkc

Hannah has sent in this entry for the ‘Fun with Fruit’ competition that is absolutely amazing. It is on SlideShare but I have added it below. Watch it, you will love it!

A fantastic effort Hannah, you are a born filmmaker!

Hope you have a great holiday!

The term is nearly over and some of you may be feeling stressed because you have assessments to finish and feel overwhelmed by what you still have to do. Things won’t get any easier next term as there are school exams followed reasonably quickly by the NCEA externals in term four. If you feel like you are constantly dodging traffic and just hanging in there use the holidays to sort yourself out. Everyone’s individual reactions to preparing for NCEA will be different. Some of you, however, may be panicking. Follow this advice on taking exams, and reduce stress the easy way.

Plan your time
Draw up a realistic revision schedule and stick to it. Include some time for relaxation — it’s not healthy to constantly have your nose in a book. To maximise your concentration, break up your time into 15-minute segments, interspersed by five-minute breaks. Knowing that you have a break coming up helps to prevent you from losing interest completely.

Don’t be unrealistic
You’ve spent most of your life at school, and you have a good idea of what you’re capable of. If you’re an average student, you’re unlikely to suddenly jump to the top of the class. Being realistic will help prevent you (and your parents!) from being disappointed when the results come in. The key thing is to do your best.

Avoid alchohol and drugs
Anything that can give you a high will eventually give you a low. Don’t try to deal with your stress by turning to alcohol or recreational drugs — apart from anything else, you need all the memory you can get right now! Try not to drink too much coffee either — the caffeine won’t help you to concentrate. Drinking plenty of water will keep you hydrated and your brain functioning at its best.

Revise methodically
Simply reading long swathes of text is not going to help you to remember facts and figures. Write out important dates, facts or passages, use lots of coloured pens and underline key phrases. Go back over these notes a day later, and then a week after that. Your memory will be better and you will feel more confident about your exams.

Test yourself
Test yourself or get someone to test you on your notes. Bribe a brother or sister to do it for you, or ask your parents. Testing yourself regularly means that you remember facts better and any gaps in your knowledge can be picked up in good time — making the actual exam a lot less stressful.

Stick notes around your house
Buy cardboard stars in bright colours from newsagents, or make some out of card. Write key facts and phrases on each and stick them around your bedroom (preferably on items where they won’t leave a mark!) in places where you’ll often see them, for example, on your mirror or inside a cupboard that you often open. After a while, these facts will sink in without any extra effort on your part.

Ignore your friends
Not entirely, of course! But when your mates say how much revision they’ve been doing, they might not be telling the truth. Don’t use them as a benchmark — they might not want to seem nerdy for doing lots of revision, or they might not be doing enough. Know yourself and know what you have to do — you’re in this for yourself.

Ask for help
There are great sources of support available if you feel that you need it. Ask a teacher if you don’t understand a particular topic now that you’re revisiting it — it doesn’t have to the one who taught you if you don’t feel that they’re good at explaining things to you. School counsellors and even good old mum and dad are also great for getting worries “off your chest”. You’re not alone, so don’t feel that you have to be.

Get some exercise
Exercise is a great way to give yourself a break and to max out your concentration span. You don’t have to do hours of circuit training — a 15-minute jog or a brisk walk will do the job nicely.

All NCEA English students will need to be able to write an essay. Your teachers will help you to do his but you can also work on this yourself. I have selected some study sites and made links to them below. Try and have a look in the holidays.

Englishbiz

Essay Planning

Know your questions

If you need to find a good book for the holidays here are a couple of suggestions.

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel:

A boy drifts across the ocean on a yacht with only a tiger for company. From this unconventional beginning a novel exploring religion, philosophy and humanity is born, written in beautifully simple prose. A very entertaining read.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt:

I warn you this is a hard novel to put down! A boy leaves California to attend a New England College and falls in with a group of students of Ancient Greek. Four of their number work themselves into a trance-like state one night, and murder a local farmer. If you are interested in classics and psychology you should enjoy this book.

The image mosaic generator is another thing to play with and it can be found here. You upload one of your photos and it gathers images from flickr and it turns it into a mosaic.

You may be underwhelmed by the picture until you see the large version and then you can see all the hundreds of little photos that make it up. Enlarge my mosaic below to see.

The photo is of Carolyn Burnham, a character in the film American Beauty.

Here is something that you might want to play with - it’s a word generator and it can be found at http://metaatem.net/words. All you have to do is type in a word and it takes photos from flickr and spells out your word.

Here’s a quiz about To Kill a Mockingbird. Identify who is being described in the following quotes:

1. Who is ‘… a deep reader, a mighty deep reader’?
2. Who ‘was all angles and bones: she was near-sighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard’?
3. Who ‘was a thin leathery man with colourless eyes’?
4. Who was ‘a chameleon lady who worked in her flower beds in an old straw hat and men’s coveralls…’?
5. Who ‘gathered his meteorological statistics from the Rosetta Stone’?

Post your answers and the first person to get them all correct will win some lovely chocolate…mmm chocolate.

Cerise entered my ‘Fun with Fruit’ slideshow competition. Her entry is called ‘Banana Slide’ and it is on Slideshare. When last I looked it had over 600 hits!

I have posted it below.

In the holidays some Year 12 students will be reading The Kite Runner as their extended text and I have posted a little bit about the novel. It is an epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.