Yesterday I attended
#nalasat in Manchester, a Show and Tell event organised by
NALA, the National Association of Language Advisors in the UK.
The event took place at the
Instituto Cervantes on Deansgate in Manchester and was attended by approximately 70 primary and secondary languages teachers, trainee teachers and language advisors.
The day was extremely well organised and around 20 or so speakers shared their ideas, experiences, and enthusiasm.
I took notes and shall share the day's main points with you now. If I miss out anything, or I've credited the wrong person please let me know and I'll modify this post accordingly.
The speakers were:
Starr shared her
mysterious cards with us. These were laminated cards on which there were 4 pictures which had a pronunciation connection. She also told us about some activities were students complete texts by using words which rhyme and also showed us an example the
sound dictionaries she uses in Key Stage 4.
Jo had a bag of puppets and props to help students improve their speaking. She had a crocodile puppet, an
easyspeak microphone and, my old favourite, lolly sticks (no mention of a
mug of misery, though).
Louisa showed us a few ICT-based things including
prezi and
goanimate and her own version of the BBC game show "
Pointless"
Here's a goanimate I made about 4 years ago...
writing dates in German by
dmcg on
GoAnimate
Sara shared her
All-Most-Some objectives and her
Records of Achievement. She finished by showing us a favourite powerpoint of mine:
Plenary Squares (this is a different, more user friendly version, not the one she used).
Pauline showed us some really great speed reading ideas and ways of getting students to read texts and identify and practise vocabulary.
Esther presented Animal Talk. She showed us 2 animal type faces featuring
llamas and
cats. She gets her students to try and work out the sentences in these type faces. A fantastic idea.
Mary is a moodle expert. She showed us some
street view mysteries for students to complete online. These were originally conceived as "on paper mysteries" by
Vincent Everett and were converted, or if you like, moodled by Mary. They can be found on Vincent's
blog and the moodled versions can be found
here.
Lisa wasn't in Manchester, her presentation was virtual. Lisa's presentation
Jugando en espanol, about learning through singing and dancing can be seen
here.
Nikki started the afternoon session with a presentation called Thinking Interculturally. She showed us a list of words in French which we had to put in order of importance. She then asked us to do it again but from the point of view of a child living in Africa. Very thought provoking.
Marie shared some ways of improving reading skills by exploiting a text. We did some exercises where we had to look for patterns in texts e.g. she read out every other word and we had to try to guess the next words and say them with her. A lot of fun and as easy or as difficult as the teacher wants it to be.
Vicky shared some ideas for using
Phonics to get students to think about pronunciation. She showed us some resources by
Catherine Cheater and explained how the scheme she uses teaches vocabulary, not by topic, but by sounds. She told us about
silent letter strikethrough activities to do with students and shared some great reading websites with us, too:
Erzsi teaches Spanish in primary schools and showed us the amazing results of an etwinning project she has done with schools in Spain. The pupils share videos and photos with their partner schools in order to improve language learning and cultural knowledge. One of the videos showed pupils saying how they get to school and who they travel with. Fantastic idea.
Natalio is a languages advisor. He showed us some great ways of getting pupils to speak in the target language. He taught us the suits of deck of Spanish playing cards and gave us an activity to do which had us all speaking some very basic (in my case) Spanish.
Daniel is president of the
Shropshire Languages Society and he shared with us some of the ICT-based games and quizzes his organisation has produced. He explained how the game
Telepathy works with students playing against each other show who has the most knowledge of vocabulary.
My offering was the "
ipad or my pad" presentation. It went down quite well but I hope that the serious message behind it also struck home. My point is: use ipads but use them properly, effectively and make sure there is some language learning involved. I plugged
Joe Dale's MFL ipad CPD session and gave the link to his ipads for learning webinar
blog where lots of appley-good information can be found.
Vanessa presented Du début à la fin a collection of amazing resources in both Spanish and French. She showed us ideas for remembering vocabulary, good ways to get students to fill in grids and she shared her idea for a display wall of post it notes.
Odette is an independent advisor for MFL. She taught us a song with actions
les pouces en avant
Alison shared
Daly's Double Drop with us. Sadly, not a real ale but a game in which students accumulate virtual Euros throughout the lesson. They can gamble with her as to whether they have the right answers in their work and they lose and win Euros depending on the quality of their work. A good way to promote MFL in conjunction with moral and social values.
Charlotte shared with us an ipad application
iDoceo. I hate to say it but it looks like a great piece of software. It's a teacher planner, mark book, spreadsheet, grade calculator and much more.
Sarah shared her powerpoint activities Attention aux bombes. A game where students choose a number on the screen behind which there are pictures. The students have to say a phrase, word, sentence about the picture. However, behind some of the pictures are bombs which explode. Students are motivated by trying to find the bombs. Sarah also made some others which had different "bombs" e.g. on the one she made about pets there was a howling wolf instead, the food one had custard pies, etc..
Sarah also shared with us some Thunks. These are questions to which there are no wrong answers but which students must be able to give opinions. e.g. One I've used with AS students: Peut-on vivre sans musique?
It was a fascinating day and, as usual I learned an awful lot and was reminded of many activities, sites and resources which I hadn't used for ages.
Apparently, there will be another one sometime next year.
I can't rate it highly enough and I raise my hat to, and wish to thank, Marie O'Sullivan and anyone else who was involved in organising the day. It was brilliant!
