I’ve organised and tidied up some of the prefixes I’ve posted before. They could be used as starters (there are around 30 of them) at A level or for higher achieving GCSE, homework or compiled into larger sections. Where I’ve used them so far I’ve encouraged students to find example words containing the prefixes to make more sense of them.
Please note, some of the terms are clearly not common even in biology and are included more for a ‘huh’ factor. They aren’t easily guessed either.
Huh, just realised I’d not put this on the site despite posting about it here. Nothing fancy, a single slide to help students form balanced arguments. They generally find this difficult, but I like to think that it is at least getting them to consider building arguments more effectively. The categories I chose can be changed of course, and if you don’t like the $$$ for ‘economic’ arguments feel free to change it.
I use it primarily with GCSE students with pollution/waste type topics, also some aspects of health like stem cells and vaccinations. Printed versions may be more appropriate for some students.
Inspired by a @DrWilkinsonSci post, (see also on his blog) I cobbled together some reading for science ideas. There are ten here, mainly to do with people involved in scientific discoveries in some way but also some parts on organs just to see what they play like. The idea is to get students reading about science and encountering unfamiliar words to develop vocabulary, use annotation skills and also expand extra-curricular knowledge. They are split into paragraphs so they can be read out loud easily (ish) by students in class. I would pitch this around Year 9.
I’ve left them in .doc format so people can edit themselves as they see fit.
LIT small intestineLIT Semmelweiss and AgparLIT new medicinesLIT MicroorganismsLIT Mary MontaguLIT KidneysLIT HeartLIT evidence in medicineLIT Charles DarwinLIT Anatomy
In a passing Twitter comment a few months back @ejsearle mentioned that there was a rumour that there were “more words on the bio gcse paper this year than English lit.” I thought this was an interesting idea, since I’d also noticed from some exam board meetings that I thought the biology material supplied seemed overly wordy in comparison to similar questions from the chemistry and physics side, both in the combined (trilogy) and separate sciences. So here is my quick and rather fuzzy analysis of the language used on some of the papers this year.
As a starting point, I used the idea of ‘Tiers’ to describe language, something I came Continue reading “Language on the 2018 exam papers”
Mr Whellan's Science 