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Having read your info Jog on, it sounds very similar to mine!! My new class appears to be a very poor cohort on paper. There are 30 in the class with 17 boys and 13 girls. All 17 boys are below 2A, with 7 below 2C, 3 2C/2B and 7 2B/2A The girls are not quite as bad with 3 below 2C/2B, 2 girls are 2B/2A, 3 are 2A/3C and 5 are 3B God! Now that I read these closely, I realise what an uphill battle I'm facing!!!!

For me, reading has to be a huge influence. None of these children were heard read regularly by their parents last year. I've put up a Harry Potter reading challenge, where children move up through the Harry Potter houses each time they read 10 times to a parent. Their parent must sign their reading record to prove this. The children who have the first 50 signatures win prizes/see the Head/assembly honours etc. This worked brilliantly last year and should improve their spellings/syllable sounding out also. One winner in my last class went from a 2C/2B at the start of the year, to a 3A with this.

I also encourage the children to put a set of brackets at the top of their page of their writing. In the brackets are a selection of punctuation/things that need to be included in a particular piece of writing. E.g. (, . ? **! ... 2A C P)** The children mark these off when they have included them in their writing and is a form of success criteria. (comma, full stop, question, exclamation, ellipsis, 2 adjectives in a sentence, a connective and a paragraph). I'm going to be including a lot of drama this term and I've tried to plan lessons that should interest the boys especially. I'm including a rough copy of my medium term plan, if anyone is interested. If any one has any comments of things to include, I would be grateful.