Being creative with Year 7.

Today was my last lesson with my year 7 French groups. When they arrived, one of the children said, "All we've done today is watch DVDs. Can we do something different?"

We have been doing a mini project on endangered animals and we had been working on dialogues asking questions like "Que manges-tu?" "Où habites-tu?" and so on.

Their speaking work isn't brilliant and I've been trying to find ways of increasing their participation.

At MFL Show and Tell on Saturday, I was impressed with Lisa Stevens' ideas and energy and decided to use one of her ideas (I'll never match her energy).

Puppets, or more precisely, pencil puppets.

They practised their dialogues, pretending to be creatures and then we filmed them. Every single child in both classes took part in a dialogue, which I filmed on my fisher-price mobile phone and they loved it.

Big result!

Unfortunately, the sound quality of the clips is not good enough to post here, but here are pictures.

Piano stairs.

Yesterday was MFL Show and Tell at Nottingham High School. It was a great day of fantastic presentations, amazing learning discussions and excellent coffee. You can watch the presentations here. I met some wonderful, inspiring linguists and learned lots of new things (most notably that comedian Miles Jupp was Archie the inventor in Balamory).

I talked about getting colleagues to make better use of ICT in order to attract more students to opt to study languages. Language learning at KS4 could be drastically reduced unless we make it more interesting to students, especially when languages have to compete with other subjects which offer 2 or 4 GCSE equivalent qualifications in the same amount of teaching time.

During my presentation I showed this clip to try to show that it could be done.