Getting started in narratives is often the hardest part. Once a story is begun, it is a lot easier to continue and finish it.

Here in Australia, narratives and stories are required to be taught from a very young age. It is covered as early as kindergarten focusing on one single event and with every year beyond that, it increases in difficulty and complexity in terms of the way it is written and assessed. It is a key component in the NAPLAN test, Selective and all throughout high school including the HSC exam in year 12. There are many components of a narrative but they all will require an introduction.

Everyone knows that knowledge is power and, in this day, and age, nearly everyone under the sun knows that you can read to improve your knowledge. There are a few initiatives to encourage students and children to read more yet many teachers and parents do not introduce anything at all. It is a growing problem that needs to change.

If you want to find out the meaning of words you don’t know in reading comprehension texts, how do we do it? There are a few different strategies we can employ. Beyond the long-term strategy of naturally growing your vocabulary, I’ll go through a method that may give you a clue to words you don’t know the meaning of.

Poetry can be annoying to get the full grasp of. From understanding the meaning in comprehension reading exercises to writing your own poems, it is critical to be comfortable with abstract ideas. I share an exercise that we use with our students to help them to begin and understanding the ideas in a poem can be different images in our mind depending on the person. There is no right or wrong way but using this exercise will help your creativity flow. It can be used with students from primary school all the way to students in high school.

Most people make the mistake of not going for the Opportunity Class (OC) exam because they feel inadequate. They don't see the benefit in it, they think it would be a waste of time considering their child's level or they would not accept moving schools anyway. Develop the mindset and the strategy on why I believe the opposite and why every child and student should participate in it regardless of whether they make it in or not.

The NSW Writing Selective exam has undergone some radical changes. No longer is it a one-dimensional writing task where it is easier to predict the format, instead, it now assesses a broader range of creative writing ability. If you were finding it difficult to adapt to different writing formats or wanted to know how to maximise your marks in the exam, this is the video to watch. You know you need to for the sake of getting into a Selective school, but you don't want to be wasting time on parts of the writing that doesn't yield enough return.