Help your students ace their GCSE writing exams

One of the hardest things for students to get right in the writing exams is the 150-word question in the higher paper. It's designed to let the grade 7-9 students really show off what they can do... but it can also leave them feeling lost and stuck for ideas.

That's why I've created 2 new lessons for you to download for FREE, which will walk you and your students through a model answer to a writing task from the SAMs, and give them the help and ideas they need to craft a brilliant answer themselves.

I've done a French AQA lesson and a Spanish Edexcel lesson, but the beauty of these lessons is that they can easily be adapted for other languages and any topic.

The structure of the lessons is as follows:

1. Vocabulary exercise using key vocab from the topic.

2. Reading task using the model answer. The questions are based on the type of tasks students will encounter in the GCSE reading exams.

3. Translate the model answer into English. This is much harder than the translation task in the GCSE reading exam, but I always think it's good to do harder tasks for revision, so the actual papers feel easy in comparison!

4. Mark schemes so you can work with the students to give the model answers a mark. For both texts, there is room for improvement (although they are completely accurate), so they might not get full marks!

5. Improve the model answer. I've provided ideas for how to improve the model answers, and you can work with your students to change sentences, add more information, include more complex language, etc.

6. Over to you! Students spend the last part of the lesson (or a subsequent lesson) creating their own responses to the exam questions.

To download the lessons, go to https://www.katelanguages.co.uk/pl/2148749859