Reinvigorate your primary English teaching and classroom with John Marsden 2024094F

Date and time

Tuesday 26 November 2024, 9.30 am to 3.30 pm

Delivery mode

In person at ISV, 40 Rosslyn St, West Melbourne

Audience 

Primary/Junior School Educator, Leader

Description

The Cornish proverb “The tongueless man gets his land took” sets the scene for this exclusive opportunity to challenge primary English teachers and leaders.

Young children are naturally poetic, in their daily endeavours to make language do what they want it to do. The challenge is to help them develop their vocabularies and their understanding of syntax and their ability to use increasingly sophisticated rhythms and patterns of speech without robbing them of their poetic expression.

Implicit and explicit in John Marsden’s teaching of language is the understanding that English is an infinitely malleable tool.

It can be made to do anything. It is for the user of language to determine what he or she wants English to do. It is not for English to bully us, rather, it is we who should bully English.

This workshop will be crammed to bursting point with new understandings – and hundreds of new English lessons and activities.

Key takeaways

• strategies on how to teach young students to think and feel and observe at the same time as they talk and write.
• greater understanding on how to help young students experiment with language, be adventurous and to be unafraid.
• tools for new English lessons and activities.

Presenter information

John Marsden   

John Marsden was born in Victoria, Australia in 1950.  He went to many different primary schools, and from an early age enjoyed the journeys into magical worlds that reading could provide.  His teachers in Grade 4 and Grade 6 encouraged him to write, and at the age of nine he decided he wanted to become an author.

For seven years he attended The King's School Parramatta, a strict military school in Sydney, and from there went on to the University of Sydney.  However, he soon decided that a career in law looked too boring, so he dropped out and drifted around for nearly 10 years, trying different jobs, and earning just enough money to support himself.

When he was 28, he began a teaching course, which he loved from the start. Embarking on a teaching career, he also became more and more interested in writing, and in 1987 succeeded in getting his first book, "So Much to Tell You", published.  A string of huge hits followed, highlighted by the ‘Tomorrow’ series and ‘Ellie’ chronicles. John has now sold more than 2 and a half million books in Australia alone, but is an international best-seller, with many major awards to his credit.

John's interest in education has never waned. In 1998 he bought the Tye Estate, 850 acres of natural bush, on the northern edge of Melbourne, and later added the property next door. For eight years he ran enormously popular writers' courses and camps at Tye, before starting his own school there, Candlebark, in 2006. Then in 2016 he opened Candlebark’s sibling school, Alice Miller for students in Years 7-12.

Link(s) to relevant VRQA Standards

• Curriculum and Student Learning – Student learning outcomes