Teaching grammar.

It's fairly impossible to learn a language without learning grammar.

I'm learning Danish.

Danish grammar is quite difficult in some respects:

en hund = a dog
hunden = the dog
hunde = dogs
hundene = the dogs

et problem = a problem
problemet = the problem
problemer = problems
problemerne = the problems

...and quite easy in others:

jeg er = I am
du er = you are
han er = he is
hun er = she is
vi er = we are
de er = they are

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to teach a grammar lesson (present tense of regular verbs) to a group of year 7 students.

To get some context I asked what topic they were studying.
The answer was: no topic, we just want you to teach the verbs.

For someone who is quite proud of the intricacy of weaving grammar into Schemes of Work (see here) this seemed a little weird. Especially as they will probably only ever encounter a handful of IR verbs and, as their eventual targets, were very low, they really didn't need to be able to conjugate the whole verb....did they?

Apparently they did.

So, I made these...

(Engaging students with disgusting vocabulary is my forté...)

The students were given one of these jigsaw puzzles to solve and then had to create a set of rules for their partner (who had to do the same with their jigsaw) so that their partner could solve their partner's puzzle using the rules. They then had to complete a set of grammar activities based on the rules they had just learned (taught themselves).

It all went well but I can't help feeling that I could have done it better had it been a part of a topic in which they could have manipulated the verbs for a purpose, rather than a mechanical grammar exercise.

Royal Wedding links in French, German, and Spanish.

Just in case you missed it, there's a wedding this week.

Here are some links to articles/videos you might like to use in your classroom:

(I like that different countries and types of publication take very different angles on the story.)

Useful for GCSE, too!

French

• Paris Match
• Gala
• Madame Figaro
• Voici (all about the cost!)
• Huffington Post (timetable to the minute)
• Femme Actuelle (Why the guests won't get cake!)

German

• Gala (Gossip about their celebrity guests)
• Stern (everything you need to know about the day)
• Bild (Queen gives them permission to marry)
• NDR (wedding with no politicians)
• TZ (Meghan breaks protocol) 
• Bunte (the breaking of wedding traditions)
• Bayern3 (competition to win a trip to the wedding, well, OK, London, not the wedding)

Spanish

• mujerhoy (the curious details)
• harpersbazaar (all the official details) 
• hola (which of Meghan's family didn't get an invite)
• vanitatis (the frock!)
• vogue (everything you need to know)
• abc (a victim of the Manchester attack is invited)

French Literature Top Trumps

Top Trumps is a card game.

The cards contain numerical information.

Players compare data on their cards and if they trump their opponent's number, they win.

The card sets are made by Winning Moves Games and you can make personalised sets on their website (for £15).

Three years ago I made these cards (using Word) for my students studying Maupassant's Boule de Suif:

I gave each character a score based on their kindness, wealth, hypocrisy, and courage.

The players (today, it was my year 12 students) play the game in the traditional Top Trumps way, but with a catch:

Obviously, they had to speak in the target language and they also had to explain why the character on their card had that particular score.

It's a great way to practise speaking and get students to understand and articulate some of the themes dealt with in the story.

And they enjoyed it, too.

Cootie Catchers and GCSE speaking questions

I've done this before but the link to Gail Lovely's website doesn't work any more.

Fear not, I've found a new site "downloadable cootie catchers" with a link here

You can do this in pretty much any subject, too, not just MFL.

These are examples of the ones I made with my German GCSE a couple of years ago.

 
They help with speaking in that students can work in pairs to practise possible questions they may get in their speaking exam.

Each of my lesson titles is a question which students will be able to answer by the end of the lesson.

I also made an animated gif to show students how to make them:

Enjoy!

Usain Bolt and expected progress.

Watch this:



It's the world's fastest man breaking the 100m world record in 2009.

Nobody has ever run as fast as this over this distance.

Ever.

He is a god.

I'm the least sporty person I know but even I am impressed.

You probably are, too.

Unless you are a school data manager...

If you are, you're probably have a spreadsheet which tells you how fast he should have run in his next race.

And you're probably really disappointed with him...

What's the point I'm labouring here? I hear you ask...

Expected progress.

If you were good at English and/or maths at primary school, you should be good at everything in secondary.

Here's an idea, why not just do your best to get your students to do their best?

That's more than enough...

Haters gonna hate and measureres gonna measure...

Don't be a measurer.

Be a facilitator...

A 2 minute speaking task for everyone.

This is good fun and stops me getting bored during lessons.

I write key words of pieces of paper/post its and put them in various pockets.

The students all stand up, I pull out a scrap of paper and have to guess what the word is.

If they get it wrong, they sit down.

If they get it correct, they win a merit point.

We keep going until someone guesses it right.

It's a great way of getting them to speak, to revise vocabulary and get pronunciation correct.

It takes no more than 2 minutes. 

Maximum.

It would be good for a bit of flipped learning too...

Headline gap fill - practising vocabulary

On the BBC comedy panel programme Have I Got News For You, in the final round, the panellists have to guess missing words from headlines from the week's news.

(They did a similar game called Supermatch on Blankety Blank, too.)

In December I saw this headline on the BBC news website :

Gwen Stefani has Mariah Carey sized goals.

For a giggle I decided to play a gap fill game with my social media followers. 

So I gave them this:

Gwen Stefani has Mariah Carey sized ____________.

As you can imagine, the answers ranged from sensible to funny to quite risqué to obscene.

What did you expect? They are my friends!

As with most silly ideas, I wondered how I could use this in my classroom.

A starter activity with an element of competition.

You can do this with groups of all abilities and ages.

Give the students a sentence with a blank (or blanks) and get them to guess the missing word(s).

Students who come up with the correct answer (or the funniest answer) win points.

And what do points make?

Prizes!

And safer railways!


Some examples:

Emmanuel Macron a un ___________.

Dans ma ___________ j'ai un __________ orange.

Chaque samedi mon voisin fait ___________.

Justin Bieber semble être ___________.

Les Français sont devenus accros à ___________.
  

You could think of hundreds more, I'm sure.

PS I've just been reminded of a blogpost by Clare Seccombe all about using Blankety Blank as a classroom activity.