Okay. It's been a while. User- and student-generated content seems to be the way forward for this blog to have any chance of being kept up-to-date.

To sum up: we whizzed through visual non-fiction, and attempted to create our own travel documentary for visiting Martians - via mastering the skills of storyboarding, which we had played with before (see below) and audio narration.

So one lesson was spent wandering around the school getting some photos, which we will append some of the narration to soon.

Squeezed in amongst this was some punctuation practice, some looking at implicit / explicit meaning - that's the stuff that's obvious, on the page (explicit), and the stuff that we read into (implicit) - via an examination of BBC travel articles.

Then to cap it all off we tried a practice SAT paper - a year to go, but you can never start preparing too early.

Moreover, a great way to end the term!

This was a back to basic lesson, doing work on apostrophes, picking up on some common errors in our writing thus far. Not much to report, really - apart from the fact that everyone seemed to have gotten the hang of them by the end.

When are they used?

1. POSSESSION AND 2. OMISSION!

1 = Scott's dairy (the diary Scott possesses...)

2 = I can't go on! (the 'n-o' has been omitted from cannot and replaced by an apostrophe...)

Do we ever put an apostrophe before the 's' of plurals?

NEVER!

Do we ever put an apostrophe in 'its' when we are talking about possession?

NEVER! Only use an apostrophe when it's 'it is.' Yeah?

Oh, also - some pupils were still a bit cold. Was it all the talk of the South pole? Or maybe the heating had gone.

Don't worry, I'm still learning. The 'a' from 'I am' has been omitted and replaced with an apostrophe. See? Who says we need to take our coats off in school...

Bonus prize: Can you tell which pupil is under wraps? Credit for the first correct answer put as a comment to this post.

The fire goes out!

The team struggle through the ice...

Scott loses his left hand through frost-bite; the rest of the crew are hysterical. It can't be long before the end comes...

So - the 'project' is finally out there. In these lessons we moved from the diary format onto its 21st Century equivalent - the blog. Would Scott have been a blogger? He was very conservative and traditional, so perhaps not. But Oates probably would have.

"I'm just going outside (for a blog). I may be some time (blogging)..."

After we learned that 'blog' came from 'web' (Internet) and 'log' (diary), we looked at the differences between the paper diary and the online diary. The keywords we came up with were: interactivity, intertextuality and non-linearity.

Big words, I know. Posh words. But simple when broken down.

Interactivity - people other than the author can get involved with the text! For readers comment on blogs, unlike diaries (some people already have - thank you!). And you can comment on their comment. And so on.

Intertextuality - it is part of loads of other texts! You can go on a blog - but it is probably on a site with access to lots of other blogs. And there will be hyperlinks to other websites, there will be adverts and so on. A blog, like the web, is one big... well, web of text, all freely mingling and meshing and coming apart again.

Non-linear - Just means not in a straight line. Most texts, like Scott's diary, do go in a straight line. A = Start the expedition, p.1... B = Death, the final page. But a blog, or any internet text, can be accessed halfway through, you can branch off to sample other texts before you come back... you might not even reach B, the final page, and not because you're too bored - because the web has taken you elsewhere! The non-linearity is a direct consequence of the intertextuality.

Anyway. We then split off into learning stations. In groups, 8CH took it in turns doing things such as research, storyboarding, peer assessing the group's cohesion, writing more haiku and punctuating postcards.

For a first stab at self-regulated learning within a very different classroom environment, we fared pretty well. Some content for the blog was even created... which will be uploaded in good time. There have been some teething problems upgrading - when things are sorted we will be able to put lots more stuff up.

In the meantime, let's leave you with an excerpt from one of our storyboards this lesson. Dan, Scarlett, Paige and Chloe's group were very conscientious in attempting to translate Scott's diary into images. They clearly went to great lengths to get into the explorers' heads...

Scott and his crew try to keep warm in the Antarctic chill.

Well, if you've been sweating over the weekend on how the group assessors would feedback, then sweat no longer.

(In fact, you've probably been sweating longer for another weekend - due to technical problems this entry failed to post when written last week... sorry.)

Yes, wipe yourself down, indeed. The wait is over, and the general consensus, a phrase which came up for every group, was this:

"The group worked well."

And it's true - but was this because they knew they had peer assessors? Or just coincidence?

Our writing task this week is to create a long-lost extract of Captain Scott's diaries (or those of his wife). 8CH had to imagine themselves as the doomed explorer - to get into his head using the research we've done on his life, the analysis of the diary extracts, our subsequent knowledge of the diary format, and....

Answers to some questions we actually put to Captain Scott himself!

(Well - it was really Mr. Anderson with a scarf, hat, coat and posh voice. And then Lewis W had a go - thanks Lewis. Hot-seating, as it's called, is a great way to explore characters, be they fictional or historical.)

Anyway, drafts were started in the back of books to be written up in neat for Thursday. Each piece will be assessed and the pupil given a National Curriculum Assessment Level.

Well, a surprise was sprung this lesson. Our double was split asunder and we were privileged to have one half in the library with the poet, Mike Garry.

Let's let the pictures speak today:

Brain gym with Mike Garry

The man himself, mingling after the session

It was great fun. The man loves words - and 8CH felt that love by the end.

And we even managed to calm down and finish our group work in the last lesson. There was some intelligent analysis of each extract and we manged to nail down all the main features of the diary format (see detail below) and more besides.

So the groups did pretty well - on the surface. Just how well will be revealed next lesson when one student from each group feeds back on how well the group did. It's another cliffhanger...

What was supposed to be a glorious display of technical wizardry to start this lesson sadly fizzled away before it began - all because of a faulty lead... So no punctuation starter, then, just a quick pep talk (and a damp squib - see pic below).

Hello. I am damp.

This aborted venture just happens to have clear parallels with Captain Robert Falcon Scott. His own Antarctic mission was doomed before he began, when he opted for large animal furs for his men rather than the layers of clothing that Amundsen chose for his. From insulation to inspiration, though: his scribblings are a great example of another classic form of travel writing: the diary.

After defining the different forms of travel writing on the board, we then split into groups and started analysing a different extract from Scott's diaries, looking to identify the key features of the diary format. Each group has appointed a scribe, to write down their findings; a voice, to feed back about their findings; and an assessor, to feed back about how well the group worked together.

How did 8CH get on? Did the groups cohere or fall apart? Who reached the metaphorical pole first and cracked the key components of the diary format? Watch this space...

This first lesson of the module we defined what exactly Travel Writing was, through general discussion and looking at an extract from Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Small Island' (funny, accessible stuff if you haven't tried it). This is what we came up with:

Travel Writing = Non-fiction about places where the author has travelled to.

We also fantasised about places we'd like to visit, which led us on to have a first go at travel writing of our own: postcards. It is best to start with the classics. Anyway, after going through a model postcard on the board, everyone drafted their own - making sure to be aware of the audience for this text... their parents. After this first draft, pupils swapped their work with the person next to them to check over for mistakes. When it was swapped back, each pupil was given a proper postcard of their own, which they filled in from their draft - in silence, under timed conditions!

If parents are reading this, you'll be able to judge for yourself how their handwriting stood up to the pressure - as we will be sending the postcards home. Also, see if they have convinced you that they were reallyin China, Las Vegas or Cuba, rather than a rainy Eckington...