Carnegie Prize shadowing

As discussed in class, you can read any of the Carnegie Prize shortlist and comment on them at the shadowing website. Please pick up a book from the library and email your thoughts to either Mrs Grimmond (mg@hsog.co.uk) or me.

You can see other readers' views on the books here.

Past paper marking instructions

In response to requests, here are links to the marking schemes for the two past papers below.

2007

2008

When assessing your work, try to set yourself targets for the exam, about how you could pick up marks if a similar question came up again.

SQA past papers

Here you can find SQA past papers. There are Close Reading and Writing papers from 2007 and 2008.

I suggest that you pick a few writing tasks to work on, and at least two to practise under exam conditions. Flex your writing muscle!!!

'Mockingbird' essay support

Here is the essay support sheet for the 'Mockingbird' essay.

As discussed, the essay will be due on Monday 30th March. I am aware that some of you have very busy lives over the next few weeks, so please plan your workload carefully to make sure that you will be able to submit the essay on time.

Shakespeare assembly

Please post any ideas for a Shakespeare assembly. In class, we discussed the following~:

• looking at his language (new words or widely used phrases)
• Looking at the relevance of his themes
• Put together short versions of a couple of the plays which are widely studied in school

Please add your own suggestions, or build on these, in your comments.

Reading list

Here are 100 novels that we have put together as our senior reading list. If you want some personalised recommendations, come and have a chat with me.

I would expect that you would try first of all to choose your RPR text from this list, but of course if you want to choose something different then you could always speak to me and discuss it.

Mockingbird links

As discussed in class, please comment on at least one of the links on the right. Let us know what you found interesting or enlightening, or your thoughts on how what you read will afect your reading of the novel.

Standard Grade Critical Essay Writing

Click on the above link to see some general advice about writing critical essays. You should also look at the feedback from your Romeo and Juliet essay, to make sure that you are picking up on any advice.