Literacy skills

As senior mock exams draw near, I thought of how I can equip my students with literacy
skills and exam techniques that would better prepare them for an External Exam.

One exam in particular AS 91039 provides students with a resource booklet from which
students will digest through choosing relevant information to answer three sections in
the exams.

My first goal was to give them practise with being able to skim read and scan for specific
information to answer the question.

We started by analysing what was required of them to gain an Achieved, Merit and
Excellent.

I gave them an acronym CIGE (for some reason they would remember this) and POV
(as in salted meat Povi masima that we eat in the islands). Each of these letters would
represent the information they needed to skim and scan for to write the achieved part
of their essay question. C - Cultural Change I -individual G - Group involved E - Evidence
and POV - Point of View.

To make it more interesting, I asked the students to highlight specific information using different colours in the reading text and to work in pairs. The students seemed

 engaged with the whole process.