This is a lesson idea, that was shared with me by another RMPS teacher. I felt my pupils needed to fully understand how to really answer exam questions and know the difference between describe and explain questions.
I firstly gave the pupils different sentence starters that our wonderful Principal Assessor created, with sentence starters that would help show KU, Analysis and Evaluation skills. I asked pupils to highlight sentences the thought they might use.
This lesson involved firstly pupils being asked to describe the Jaffa Cake. I encouraged pupils to “PEE” into their answers- Point Evidence Explain. e.g. The Jaffa Cake looks yummy. I can see the jaffa cake has chocolate on it. Chocolate tastes nice therefore I will probably like the taste of Jaffa Cakes.
The second part of the lesson was related to the question, “Is a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit”. From this I got pupils to create “Fish Diagrams” I found the example on this powerpoint..Pupils listed each point at the end of the stems and then from these stems they added extra information they would include in their answer. The pupils then wrote their answer out in full and peer assessed each other.
The pupils said that this helped them understand how to answer exam questions, although some answers I did see in jotters were still a little bit on the “lets write everything I know down and hope I get a few points” type. But I hope we are getting there.
Thanks to Donnah for sharing this lesson idea. I know feel my pupils will be expecting some sort of food reward everytime we do study skills now.
Learning RMPS 