AS Comms - Groups

 In-group & out-group formation

Asch conformity experiment

Sherif's Robber Cave Study - group conflict

AS Lit: The April Challenge

A2 LangLit - final advice for the coursework - Part 2

Coursework deadline: Wednesday March 23rd 2016
9am - 12pm; 1E3

Remember that when you submit the final essay, you must also submit:

• your first draft
• the extracts/poems you have used for your essay - these can be annotated

1. Look again at your opening paragraph. Remember how crucial this is for setting up your argument. A reminder of what AQA say about this:

Highlight your own thesis. Does it narrow  down the parameters of what you are going to explore from the question? Does it give your essay a strong direction to move on from? Does the rest of your essay actually refer back to the thesis and develop an argument? Are you using topic sentences to hold your argument together?

2. Run through your essay with 2 differently coloured highlighters, identifying the parts of your essay that are about Blake's poetry and the parts of the essay which are about Death of a Salesman. Make sure that your essay is evenly balanced between the two & that you are rotating between the two texts.

3. Run through your essay again with a highlighter - this time, identify all of the moments where you make a comparative point, even if just briefly. Look closely at any sustained parts of your essay where there are no comparisons. Have you missed any opportunities?

4. Re-read your essay, focusing on your use of terminology. Are you demonstrating a wide vocabulary? Is your use of technical terms precise and accurate? Are you using literary & linguistic terminology? Are you using discourse analysis (where appropriate)?

5. Now think about context. Remember that context is measured in all sorts of ways. Have you contextualised the extracts from DOS that you are writing about? The poems you have chosen? The quotations you have selected? Where appropriate, have you embedded social, historical and literary context within your arguments?

Finally - a reminder of what you are being assessed on:

A2 Lang Lit - final advice for the coursework - Part 1

Coursework deadline: Wednesday March 23rd 2016
9am - 12pm; 1E3

Remember that when you submit the final essay, you must also submit:

• your first draft
• the extracts/poems you have used for your essay - these can be annotated

Basic checklist:

• Your name on every page
• Title/question at the top of page 1
• Page numbers
• Writers' names spelled correctly 
• Names of texts (always in full - no abbreviations) differentiated through use of italics, bold or '  ', with capital letters in the right place
• Verse quoted as verse, using / where the line break should be                              ('... so I said/Hush Tom never mind it')
• Single spaced; font size 12
• Word count at end - excluding quotations (yes - you will need to count!)
• Proofread carefully and run a spell check
• Blake's poetry = reader; Miller's drama = audience

AS Literature - poems we have studied so far (11th March)

AS Comms - How to finish your Moviemaker & turn it into a film

In order to 'finish' your Moviemaker so that it becomes a single movie file (which is what you will submit), you need to go through the following process:

1. Make sure your MM project is definitely complete - watch it through from start to finish, checking that your voiceover synchs with the images, that nothing is clipped off, and that you have faded your audio in and out so that your transitions are smooth.

2. When you are 100% happy, select the 'Save Movie' tab on the far right of the toolbar (below) & select 'Recommended for this project'.

3. Choose your Comms folder (on your student drive) as the destination for the file.

4. Click 'Save' and then a progress bar (see below) will appear mapping the progress of your project being converted into a movie file. Depending on how busy the network is / how big your project is, this can take quite a long time. It usually takes 5 - 10 minutes but can take 30 mins.

You then need to copy your movie onto your usb for the submission of the coursework (keep a copy on your student drive!)

AS Literature - revision notes on the poems

I stumbled across this English revision blog, which includes notes on the poems we are studying (written by students). You might find it useful - especially to catch up if you have missed a poem or two.

Genetics - blog post by Lisa & Ailbhe

Genetics by Sinead Morrissey

This poem talks about the importance of marriage and the celebrated relationship between a mother and father even though they have separated.  It talks about how even though the parents have separated; ‘the child’ is a representation of their marriage and love they had once shared. The poem ends with the narrator speaking to who we believe is her lover and she is telling him the importance of marriage.

One interpretation we made was that the palms and hands were a metaphor for the mother and father’s relationship. It is given the actions of repelling and also linking together. ‘They may have been repelled to separate hands’/ ‘but in me they touch where fingers link to palms’. To emphasise this, the poet refers to a children's game where the hands are put together with the index fingertips touching, knuckles of the other fingers touching, and the thumbs bent inwards. The index fingers, children are told, represents the steeple or tower of the church, the knuckles the body of the church and the folded thumbs the door. When turned over so the palms and fingers are exposed, representing the contents of the church. "Here is the church... here is the steeple... open the door... and here are all the people. ”  The third stanza shows us the opinions of family members and friends who witnessed the coming together of the parents. ‘but friends who quarry for their image by a river’. This shows us that the relative are searching and trying to remember the memories of  the good times they shared ( photos, videos); “nothing left of their togetherness but friends” – brings about the question of who’s side do the couple’s friends go on?

The poem is a poem is a Villanelle form which is very structured and has a strict rhyme scheme, 5 stanzas with 3 lines however the last stanza includes 4 lines. Stanza 1 to 5 is recognition of her parents’ marriage and the last stanza gives us different approach as she is speaking to her lover. ‘ I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms’.  Rhyming words like words such as ‘palms’, ‘hands’ and ‘demands’ which may at first seem shaky (making them half rhymes), however this helps to highlight that children are not carbon copies of their parents, a direct link to the title. But that there is always a link despite physical separation gives us different approach as she is speaking to her lover. ‘I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms’. The use of repetition is repeated at the beginning of the poem and also at the end: ‘My fathers in my hands, but my mothers in my palms.’ This shows us how close her and her parents her even though they are not together.