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Enrichment tasks in English Stars

English Stars 31/7/23

Enrichment tasks are activities designed to broaden students’ educational experience and extend them academically. Using real-world contexts, these tasks are designed to engage students and challenge them to apply their learning in unfamiliar situations.

Incorporating enrichment tasks into your lessons is a great way to spark interest, inspire active learners, and add variety to your English program.

English Stars includes a collection of enrichment tasks across all year levels. Tasks include artistic endeavours and acting projects, as well as creative and imaginative writing tasks (with a twist). Let’s take a look at four very different enrichment tasks included in English Stars.

Putting persuasion into practice

In the English Stars 6 unit Book Club, students become publishers pitching their chosen books to an audience of booksellers.

Use our comprehensive teaching resources to support your students as they complete the task. These include slideshow activities to help students think about how to structure and present their pitch, a book pitch exemplar, an effective speaking video, a planning page and concept notes that cover the different stages of each lesson.

This enrichment task encourages students to apply the curriculum content they have been learning – including different language modes, book themes and author styles – as well as to practise their oral presentation skills within an engaging, real-world context.

From comic strip to perfect prose

Comic strips are used in the English Stars 4 unit You are the Storyteller to build knowledge about visual text features and help students write creatively.

English Stars provides you with a comprehensive teaching plan for this enrichment task. The lesson includes comic strip exemplars and activities to develop your students’ ability to interpret visual texts and understand how to write prose using comic strip dialogue as a scaffold.

Comic strips give students time to explore and interpret complex stories with limited text. They challenge students to identify how colours, shapes and body language can be used to develop plot and characterisation. Students can then draw upon these skills in their short story writing.

Finding the facts

Students try their hand at journalism to write and film a news report in the English Stars 6 unit Making News.

English Stars includes a wealth of engaging teaching resources to bring this enrichment task to life. Use the videos, planning templates, text exemplars and teaching notes to prepare students for the task.

In this task, students practise skills such as identifying key facts, recognising objective and subjective language, utilising bias and interpreting graphical images. Enrichment tasks like these allow your students to imagine themselves in a specialised professional role and may even spark interest in a new hobby or future career.

Characterisation is key

It’s time to get into character in the English Stars 3 unit The Moral of the Story. This unit sees students bring to life a character from the fable The Fox and the Crow and answer questions from their character’s point of view.

To help students embrace their character role, print out the animal masks and question templates provided. The accompanying sideshow and preparation notes are designed to help students devise questions they might like to ask each character.

This enrichment task provides students with the opportunity to consolidate skills such as identifying perspective in texts, understanding motive and using open and closed questioning. And the hands-on nature of this task ensures your students are engaged and keen to apply their learning in a novel way.

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