You may be wondering how much of the work covered in WordsPlease is also covered at school. This will vary according to the age and ability of the children and the particular syllabus from which the school is working. With WordsPlease we have tried to perform three functions:

** Reinforce what is taught and thus support teachers' efforts in providing courses that will eventually lead to excellent examination grades

** Develop ideas that teachers will not have time to cover due to the pressures of examinations, but are nevertheless of interest to intelligent children and which will give them a great deal of background to the English language and its history and development

** Provide resources and information that will enable intelligent youngsters to develop their research and communication skills in whatever way they would like. Research is so much easier these days with the internet to hand, but it is easy to fall into the trap of simply printing out large chunks of text from some website or other without really understanding what has been said or how relevant that may be to the task in hand. WordsPlease encourages young people to research with a purpose as they will have to do in the adult world.

This module provides the last article on the history of surnames and details names that arose from nicknames or appearance. We are all familiar with Robin Hood and Little John, but why was Will Scarlet so called?

The story writing continues with introducing settings. It is very important for an author to have an understanding of where a story takes place as well as when and who the main characters are. Those photographs the youngsters took with their cheap digital camera can now come in very useful.

Modal verbs feature in the grammar section. Katie describes how they can be used to persuade people to do what you want them to do as well as to describe the potential in a situation.

Writing a review of a non-fiction book provides an interesting challenge because you have to consider your own knowledge, experience and assumptions and those of your readers very carefully. Watch the movie and read page 7 and this will all be explained.

Serious poetry takes a change of direction in this module with a study of animal poems. Fun poetry looks at alphabet poetry in which each line of a poem begins with a different letter of the alphabet. Interesting and challenging at one and the same time.

The cryptic clues section is getting heavier and much practice is needed. More important than ever, then, to watch the movies first.

Writing a reasoned essay is next on the agenda and this is something that will become more and more important as the GCSE examinations approach, so it is good to build up a good knowledge of how to tackle this as early as possible.

More drama activities on the website as usual and in the magazine a pretty difficult drama related crossword activity.

Travel document writing is never easy and in this issue we tell you how to write a travel brochure to persuade people that a particular place is perfect for them.

The history of spelling looks at Old English and gives some exercises to try.

No need to say too much about the fun page - you will have a good idea of what happens there by now!

And the tricky crossword again! Good luck with this one! As a rider, we encourage intelligent youngsters to purchase a thesaurus if they do not have one already. Using the internet has its place, but there's nothing quite like sitting in your favourite chair and scanning through a book such as a thesaurus or a dictionary.