My Year 8s are working on autobiographical writing in a unit I have called, 'Scraps of Me'. The final outcome is a scrapbook of five important life events. They will create a scrapbook and each page features an image and a paragraph describing the event and the impact it had on their life. A final paragraph explores how these events have contributed to their sense of self; of who they believe they are. Scaffolding up to this, we have been working on time lines that graph out positive and negative experiences with short descriptions. We have also been focusing on nouns and adjectives, as our assessment focus is to write imaginative and interesting texts. Yesterday, I tried "Running Dictation", an idea suggested to me by a colleague. Learners were in differentiated teams according to ability and given a team colour - red, blue, green and orange. Each team was given a space in the classroom, a large piece of paper, a marker and a set of (differentiated) in...