Chris Youles - Year 5 Classroom Teacher and Author - Taipei

In this episode, I’m speaking to Chris Youles. Chris is a Classroom Teacher at Taipei European School and author of Sentence models for creative writing: A practical resource for teaching writing. 

Chris’ book is one of the most instantly applicable teaching books that I’ve come across in recent years and coupled with a robust grammatical understanding for students, it can really help students to understand how and why writers make certain choices in their sentence structures as well as how they can go about applying some of these techniques themselves.

We discuss:

1. The best text Chris has ever read, taught or been taught

2. How he went about amassing all of the different sentence types in the book

3. What the prerequisite grammar knowledge he would advise teaching before or alongside such structures

4. The extent to which certain sentence structures genuinely create a tone, mood or impression of some sort versus purely serving as a way to add variety in expression

5. How teachers might arrange such structures in a horizontal and vertical curriculum

6. Where teachers should go if they want to approach the sentence construction of rhetorical, discursive or analytical writing in the same way

Thanks again to Chris for researching and producing a brilliantly replete resource for teachers in Primary and Secondary alike as well as giving up some time to talk with me.

If you want to be kept up to date on when educational chat like this happens, then be sure to subscribe to the podcast and/or follow me on Twitter @chrisjordanhk

Links:

Chris’ book - Sentence models for creative writing: A practical resource for teaching writing.The Arrival - Shaun Tan

The Writing Revolution - Natalie Wexler and Judith Hochman

On Writing - Stephen King

The Elements of Eloquence - Mark Forsyth

The Art of the Sentence - Greg Keast

First You Write a Sentence - Joe Moran

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One - Stanley Fish