Round up for September

I thought I'd start including monthly round-ups here, as I've found them helpful on others' blogs. I'll do them on the last Sunday of the month from now on.

September Reviews

The Odds by Adam Perrott
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Obsidian Mirror by Catherine Fisher
Horrid Henry's A-Z of Everything Horrid
The Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin

2 YA (both fantasy, broadly), 2 kids' (1 fiction, 1 non-fiction) and 1 women's fiction

Other posts for September

Changes around the Hearthfire explaining my new posting schedule
Recommended Writers' Resources 2 - a helpful blogpost and a handy book
Interview with James Dawson, Author of Hollow Pike - James talks about the book, the Queen of Teen award and his writing habits
Doing More Things: A Happiness Project of Sorts - a personal post
GCSEs - the English grade boundaries issue and the current position on the EBC, the replacement for GCSEs

Material on my website this month:

My website is focused on the teaching of English A Levels, especially Language, and is built around a collection of revision notes for students. I recently began a big revamp project, including new material which is updated weekly - a series of features for students, along with tips/activities/ideas/resources for teachers. The notes are fairly extensive at this point; this round-up will focus on the regularly updated content.

For teachers: a record of the students' features (with occasional linked resources) and teaching tips:

• using starters to create groups
• differentiating analysis tasks
• focused research tasks
• activities building and testing linguistic frameworks knowledge.

On the students' pages:

• Features on: the Olympics and 'new' verbs; a child language semantic error example; language and sexuality and the implications of the Andrew Mitchell 'f*ing plebs' incident.
• Vocabulary pieces on: synonyms for 'emphasises'; ambiguity; imperious; affect/effect.
• Books for wider reading: Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Alexander Masters' Stuart: A Life Backwards.
• Reads to relax with: Keris Stainton's Della Says OMG!, Jessie Hearts NY and Emma Hearts LA; Alan Gibbons' An Act of Love; Victoria Lamb's Witchstruck and Keren David's When I Was Joe.

(For the website, the links will take you to this week's page. Older material is available in the 'archive' section.)