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Continue reading →: What is Talk for Writing – and Why I Use It with Every Child I Teach
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for ambitious children from international families If you have spent any time in British primary education in the last twenty years, you may have come across the phrase Talk for Writing. It is an approach developed by the poet and educator…
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Continue reading →: Common Entrance English: What Parents Need to Know About the Writing Paper
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for ambitious children from international families Common Entrance is one of those phrases that circulates widely among families applying to British independent schools, but is not always fully understood – particularly by parents who did not go through the British school…
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Continue reading →: Show Don’t Tell: How to Teach This Technique to Primary-Age Children
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for children from international families Show don’t tell is probably the most repeated piece of writing advice in existence. Teachers say it. Writing guides are full of it. And yet, in my experience, it is one of the least well explained…
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Continue reading →: Essay Writing at 11: What Independent Schools Expect and How to Get There
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for ambitious children from international families There is a significant step up in writing expectations between primary school and Year 7 at a selective independent school. Parents who have not been through the British independent school system themselves – and many…
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Continue reading →: How to Help a Multilingual Child Find Their Writing Voice in English
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for ambitious children from international families Voice is one of those qualities in writing that is easy to recognise and surprisingly hard to define. We know it when we read it – that sense of a real, specific person behind the…
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Continue reading →: What the 11+ Examiners Are Actually Looking for in a Writing Paper
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for ambitious children from international families One of the most useful things I can do for a child preparing for the 11+ writing paper is to help them understand something that is rarely explained directly: what the person marking their work…
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Continue reading →: The Difference Between Creative and Academic Writing – and Why Both Matter
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for children from international families There is a tendency, in the way we talk about children’s writing, to treat creative and academic writing as though they belong to entirely separate worlds. Academic writing is the serious one – the essays, the…
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Continue reading →: How to Structure a Persuasive Essay: a Guide for Children Aged 10-14
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for children from international families Persuasive writing is one of those tasks that children either take to immediately or find genuinely baffling. The ones who struggle are not usually short of opinions. Ask them face to face whether school uniform should…
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Continue reading →: Why Expat Children Often Struggle with English Writing – and What Actually Helps
By Abi | Home Star Tuition It is one of the most common conversations I have with parents. Their child is bright – clearly bright. They read well, they contribute confidently in class, they hold their own in discussion. And yet when they sit down to write in English, something…
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Continue reading →: The 11+ Writing Paper at Independent Schools – What It Is and How to Prepare
By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for ambitious children from international families When parents first start researching the 11+ process, they quickly discover that it is not one exam. It is many different exams, set by different schools or consortiums, assessed in different ways, with different expectations…
Hello,
I’m Abigail
I’m a British English online writing tutor. I hope you are able to find all the information you need. Please feel free to connect if you have any questions or to say hello.