Eng teachers, how do we prepare for the year 11 mocks, need revision guidance.

[M1ntyfresh]

Don’t know where to start, ds is overwhelmed.

I'm not a teacher but dd is preparing for mocks. The Mr Bruff's Guide to... books are amazing, they go over things in such detail and he has a guide on english language and each english literature book. get him to go over the revision guides, and then attempt a past paper (which you can get here for whichever exam board he is sitting. keep doing past papers, and ask his teacher to mark them or you can do it for him (mark schemes are provided). all the best x

Also interested.

Are the Mr Briggs better than CPG and York as we have those. Have just seen the CPG cards.

Getting the quote banks in order is a key thing I have been told.

my dd has the CPG and the Mr Briggs and she prefers the Mr Briggs ones. they are thinner and i think she finds them 'less wordy' and more to the point

Also take a look at lit charts. I is a free app and has most of the texts on it. It is from the people who did sparknotes i think. Very useful

Don't worry about him remembering full quotes at this stage if he can't., odd words within a sentence in quote marks will get his point across.

There are lots of videos on YouTube Mr Bruff being one of them, covering English lit and I think lang.

It depends on your Ds's revision style, mine liked flash cards, he couldn't get on with mind maps.

Maybe look over his exercise books to see what he has been taught?
Look at feedback for questions done and look for common issues. That will make him more aware of his own personal weak points.

Are we talking about Lit or Lang?

If Lit, then the generic guides and Mr Bruff type stuff is extremely helpful. However they are almost all geared towards the AQA exam board stuff so if he is doing one of the other boards, he'll need to be aware of how his spec differs from AQA. Audiobooks of the set texts are helpful - use for listening at 'dead' times like waking the dog, travelling home from school etc.

Lang -the biggest barrier for many of my pupils is the volume of reading - if they are slow readers they are significantly disadvantaged as quicker readers can start answering questions long before them. He needs to make sure he knows what skills are being tested in each question type, and how to answer them; and know how to write effective answers to the two 40 mark writing tasks. Does he know the difference between writing an informative article and a persuasive letter, for eg? (No real marks for layout.) again, lots of reading of example material will help. He can work on higher level vocabulary and punctuation too.

English teacher here too. I also tutor.

For Lit: I think Mr Bruff is excellent for poetry as his videos focus particularly on structure and form which is something students often find tricky to write about and therefore avoid doing. If you have time listen to each of them for each of the poems in the AQA anthology you are doing and annotate a blank poem as you are listening.
Think about which poems compare well with others in the anthology. I think Mr Bruff has videos on this too. This saves time in exams.
Make sure you know and understand what all (or as many of) the literary terms are and then use them where necessary (and name them).

Work on quotes that cover themes and write explanations about why you are using them.

Eng Lang: if you are a not a big reader then work on vocabulary. Pick an inanimate object at home and think of a really interesting way to describe it in a sentence or two. Use a thesaurus to find some more interesting words and then learn how to spell them.
Work on varying sentence structures as well as literary terms and vocab.
Make sure you understand and apply all the punctuation rules, work on spelling if necessary. Remember 16 marks for spag for AQA Papers 1 and 2 questions 5.

Know, understand and then use as many literary terms as poss. You're being asked to find and write about them in Q1-4 and then use them in Q5 so v important.
Know the difference between how Papers 1 and 2 work (pretty similar for OCR too) - again Mr Bruff has some good tips for Paper 2 persuasive writing.

My dd did GCSEs last summer and she reckons that CGP is good if you're aiming up to a grade 6 but if you want a 7-9 then you need to come up with stuff not in the CGP guides. I'm not a teacher so can't confirm if this is likely.