Since we launched our small-group English tutoring programs 5 weeks ago, we’ve been busy here at Centauri Arts. We have students every evening of the week and on Saturdays, with the youngest student being 10 years old, and the oldest 18. Here is a look at two of the small-group tutoring sessions now underway…
English Tutoring with our Grade 5-6 students
We began by exploring Roald Dahl’s autobiography, Boy. We wrote scenes from our own childhoods, and looked at how Dahl develops character. From there, we moved to nature poetry, enhancing our appreciation of language as we enjoyed William Blake’s The Tyger, Snake by D H Lawrence and Tennyson’s The Eagle. While on the subject of nature, we looked at an excerpt from Last Chance to See, a book of creative non-fiction by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, creating travel pieces of our own in an attempt to inspire in our readers a sense of awe. We looked at contemporary nonsense poetry and had fun writing our own, playing with rhythm, rhyme and poetic devices such as onomatopoeia. We enjoyed word games together, reviewed use of the apostrophe and composed lists of homophones. This week, our students are writing spooky verses for Halloween, using what they have learned about rhyme and rhythm. Next week, we’ll start to read Kenneth Oppel’s excellent book, Inkling, using it to explore paragraph structure.
… and an English Tutoring session with a group of Grade 10 students:
We began with Jeanette Wall’s excellent memoir The Glass Castle, analysing the structure of opening segments and discussing how the author builds flawed characters with empathy and compassion. We reviewed paragraph and essay structure, and responded to several questions about the text in short written pieces which we later analysed together. In our second week, we moved to poetry, dissecting Ted Hughes’ poem Wind, and responding with a written analysis. We reviewed poetic devices, and used them in our own creative writing. Next, we dissected a newspaper article which examined how the lives of girls and women in developing nations had been impacted by COVID 19. We discussed the article in detail and wrote a response to it. After that, we explored portal novels, reading excerpts from Alix Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Barren Grounds, by Cree author David Robertson. We examined the concept of ‘doorway moments’ in fiction, and invented portals in creative writing pieces of our own. One group also looked at Joseph Campbells Hero’s Journey, and developed their own novel outlines conforming to the stages of a hero’s journey. Last week, for homework, students read an article about how Shakespeare had transformed the English language. Using information from the article, they responded to the question: Why should Shakespeare be taught in schools? This week, we began a study of Macbeth by discussing how Shakespeare tackles themes important to all of us today: ambition, the nature of true love, gender, racial conflict, the idea of ‘dissembling’, and more.
I love my job!
Julie Hartley
Director
Centauri Arts
