Welcome to the rambling thoughts of a 50 year old languages teacher with too much time on his hands, most of it spent in the kitchen. If you have any comments or questions about language learning or resources please email or follow me on twitter @dominic_mcg
I'm teaching AS German again this term and decided to share my favourite links and resources with you. In no particular order they are: Fun With Languages - a great site for games and interactive activities. (Yes, even at A level) A- Level German @ Tile Hill Wood School - lots of links to various articles, videos, etc. Goethe Institut - their official AS and A2 links page. Lots of articles, tips, videos, teaching materials. dw.de - official German broadcaster's learn German site. lots of resources, news, links to video, audio files Lightbulb Languages - German A level reources Newsmap - News articles in German on topics such as: international, business, tech, sport, entertainment, health, etc News 4 kids - News items, articles and games all in simple German, aimed at young Germans Die Welt - German national newspaper Online Newspapers - links to German language newspapers from all over the world BBC links to online German TV channels University of Surrey A level German site with exercises based on AS topics Hertfordshire Grid for Learning links and materials Lerndeutsch - good resources here, especially for the film topic Jacqueline Rudenko's KS5 German pinterest page
Exciting news for North East MFL-ers! The ALLNE is hosting its first Teachmeet. It takes place on 20th October 2015 at Newcastle University's King George VIth Building in room 1.36. The Teachmeet runs from 4:30-6:30pm with the idea that attendees will have the opportunity to network and chat afterwards and perhaps wander into Newcastle for food and drinks.
This is a Teachmeet with a difference as it is specifically aimed at trainee teachers and NQTs.
Why? It came about after a conversation Steven Fawkes and I had at Suzi Bewell's MFL PGCE Show and Tell at York University this summer. Steven thought that it would be a great idea to put on similar events in the North East. There are lots of really great Teachmeets around the region, but none specifically for MFL trainees and NQTs. So after a few emails and tweets between us, the amazing organisational skills of Newcastle Uni PGCE tutor, Cheryl Mackay, Eleanor Gordon for creating the link and Rene for letting us have the venue, everything seems to be ready.
Any teachers or educationalists can sign up to attend but presenters must be either trainees or recently qualified teachers. How do you sign up? You can find out more and sign up to the event here. If you wish to present for either 2 or 5 minutes or have any questions, you can contact Steven or even Me and we'll be glad to help. Also if you're reading this and know someone who might like to come, please tell them. See you there! If you can't make it Newcastle, don't worry, we intend to host others in and around the North East during this academic year.
I love my job but I'd be tempted to move if my classroom had views like this:
This is my report of the day. (Anything in brackets wasn't mentioned and is just me thinking out loud).
The day started at 11 with a welcome from Keswick School's headteacher, Simon Jackson.
Anna Bartrum of University of Cumbria, said some opening words and gave us some activities to do to warm us up. These included a watching powerpoint where we had to identify words which flew very quickly across the screen, an activity called "ask 3 people" where we had to ask 3 questions to 3 people to find out information which we then fed back to the group. finally she asked us what all these things had in common with a sandwich.
The first presentation came from Wendy Lightfoot.
Wendy talked about starter activities which are great for practising numeracy and literacy.
They included:
order the numbers - give the students numbers as words and get them to put them in order fizzbuzz - a counting game where pupils count in the target language but replace numbers ending in a 5 with the word "fizz" and those ending in 0 with "buzz".
scrabble - getting students to create valuable words
boggle - give the students a pre-made boggle grid with key words for them to find. (You could make your own using a wordsearch creator and reuse them) wordclouds - Wendy suggested tagxedo
quick write - teacher starts to write a word on the board students have to guess it before it's finished
definition bingo - students pick words, teacher reads a definition for the students who have to work out if they have that word first letter last letter game - student says a word, their partner has to say one which begins with the last letter of their partner's word and so on. (You could even make it into game show style activities. See my blogposts on Harry and Chain Letters) anagrams - useful for consolidating spellings spot the mistake - (I know lots of teachers hate this! I quite like it. I do these types of activities regularly with my students)
Next was Jane Hegedus who shared with us some ideas for introducing a "little bit of literature" into our lessons. She talked about the ALL literature wiki and shared with us the poem un hombre sin cabeza.
Jane showed us the activities she had done with her pupils with a felt and velcro lifesize body prop, which included introducing and consolidating vocabulary, dictionary work, brainstorming vocabulary, and practising and reinforcing grammar. She also showed us how we could use Clare Seccombe's "Trash or Treasurehttp://changing-phase.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/trash-or-treasure.html" idea.
Becky Henderson was the next presenter. She showed us how to "keep it real" in Italian. She uses real situations to teach language, including cooking using the only target language. She also taught us how to order drinks in Italian by means of a song. All good fun.
Helen Tucker then told us about 3 part sentence Mastermind (I know it as Cluedo and it needn't necessarily be 3 parts!) . It's a great idea for getting students to talk. It's great for revision, takes only a few minutes to plan, it's competitive and it also makes students listen to each other.
Paul Harrison then told us about iportal4languages. This is a EU funded project for people who want to learn English, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, German, or Bulgarian. Or all six. It is completely free. You just sign up and start learning. It has its own youtube channel and, should you so wish, you can learn in Second Life too.
Stephanie Licht then showed us some Great German Resources. She told us about how we can get free, fairly robust maps of Germany for students to use and some for classroom displays for very little money. (I missed the end of this as I was preparing for my presentation. Sorry, Stephanie.)
I was next talking about Time Management. This was a 7 minute chunk of my hour long "Standing out or outstanding?" presentation from #ililc5. (This is probably the last time I'll ever do this, as I think everyone in the world has seen it by now.) It seemed to go down quite well and got a few laughs, so that's always a bonus.
The final presentation of the first session was from Alex Crawford.She talked about her department's Relationships and choices project. Her students do a lot of cross curricular work and their work often links to business studies. She showed us how her students do practical activities, creating videos, project managing a team of students, etc. to achieve well in languages. They have a weebly website with all the information and resources the students need. The students also each have to acquire a certain amount of zollars using zondle to be successful, too. (Garry Mills has written about using zondle on his blog).
After coffee (which was OK) and cakes (which were amazing!) we had the second session.
The first presentation of the second session was from Elaine Pratt. She showed us the workbooks her department uses which contain all of the worksheets and grammar needed for her groups for the whole year. (She didn't say what happened of they got lost, ruined or stolen, though.) Then she showed us a Quiz Quiz Trade activity. This is one example of the many cooperative learning structures.
Rebecca Chapman then showed us some examples of CLIL. Her students have learned about King John in History and have learned about Senegal in Geography lessons, all taught in French. There is some more information about this on the MFL page of their school's newsletter with comments from some of the students.
Stuart Gorse was next with Hugo. Hugo is a ventriloquist puppet who is the star of many youtube videos, which Stuart creates to help his students to learn.
Stuart told us that he gets bored really easily and so tries to teach in a way which will not be boring for him or for his students. Here is Hugo and Marlene Dietrich in Stuart's take on Déjeuner du matin:
Helen Tucker had to follow that and did extremely well, all things considered. She told us about using the song Léon le caméleon with her primary students and how it was used as the basis for a lesson on colours and to introduce similes.
She also showed us the poetry balls. These were strips of coloured paper with sentences, or lines of poetry on, fastened at the top and bottom with paper fasteners and then can be hung up as a display. I shall be using this idea next term.
Marie Nunes was the next presenter. She showed us her virtual classroom, lakesloveslanguages. It's a weebly account which contains all the information needed by students in each year group from primary right up to A level. There are lots of quizlet quizzes embedded onto it, also there are vocab lists, activities and videos. (It's impressive.)
The penultimate presentation of the day came from Suzi Bewell, who also provided the raffle prizes. She talked about FLAME, which isn't CLIL, in case you were wondering. Suzi talked about transforming language learning and instilling intercultural understanding into our teaching. We shouldn't always talk about the differences between different cultures, we should also talk about how similar they are, she said.
Suzi mentioned these: Sur le chemin de l'école:
Where children sleep:
and Le Travail des Enfants:
The final speaker was the day's organiser, Rebecca Wylie.
Rebecca told us about how she uses vocabulary mats, there were examples of these on our tables. They were laminated A3 sheets with key vocabulary on them.
She also showed us how she uses classdojo with her groups. (I love classdojo and blogged about it here in 2012.)
The best thing Rebecca showed us was the scratchcards she made.
These are made by putting special scratch off stickers over cards. Ours were for prizes but could be used for lots of things in the classroom and we got some to take home.
All in all, it was a fantastic day.
I met some old friends, met some new people, and learned and was reminded of loads of really good stuff.
I'm really looking forward to next year's #MFLSATLakes2.
My students will finish school for the summer at the end of this week so this week will be learning about Bastille Day, or as it should be called, La Fête Nationale.
I've done work with my students about La Fête Nationale many times over the years but realised that I'd never blogged about it.
So, here is a list of some resources and links you could use:
There's a cornucopia of resources here on the TES website.
I included a link to the institut français' German website where you could find a dossier pédagogique with exercises for students to complete before, during and after watching the film.
For the last fifteen years, the Institut Français Deutschland has held a Cinéfête for students, the Jugendfilmfestival, where Francophone films are shown and studied.
For each of these films, they have produced a dossier pédagogique all in French, with exercises all in French.
The selection of films for the 2015 festival are:
Comme un lion - Samuel Collardey
Populaire - Régis Roinsard
Le tableau - Jean- François Laguionie
L'Italien - Olivier Baroux
La Cage Dorée - Ruben Alves
Une bouteille à la mer - Thierry Binisti
Séraphine - Martin provost
Information about these films can be found on the festival site here.
A quick idea from today's lesson with Year 9 French.
We do a lot of peer marking and peer assessment.
They are quite good at spotting their friends mistakes, but, sadly, never their own.
Today, I got them thinking and encouraged them to be devious, too.
When I feedback to students, I give targets for improvement like, include a range of connectives, or intensifiers, opinions, tenses, etc. etc...
Today, they had to think of some words to give to their partner to include in their written work.
So, by looking back at their partner's last feedback from me, they had to come up with 6 words or phrases their partner had to include in a timed piece of written work we did about music preferences.
For example, if the feedback was "include a variety of connectives" they had to make a list of connectives which their partner had to use.
When the task was finished they had to go through and highlight where they had used those words and scored a point for each one. The partner with the most points was the winner.
There was an extension task for the more able. This was to write sentences using a specific number of words chosen by their partner.
Yesterday I attended the third MFL Show and Tell at York University.
It was organised by Suzi Bewell in association with ALL and sponsored by Vocab Express, Sanako, Toshiba, Sonocent, Goethe Institut, Mantra Lingua, Little Linguist, Learning French with camembear, art of brilliance, Routes into Languages, Erasmus+, Brilliant publications, Mary Glasgow, Linguascope, Hue, and OUP.
Like last year, it was a great opportunity to meet old friends, discuss language teaching, drink coffee and see short presentations from PGCE students, some NQTs and some other, more experienced languages teachers.
The first presentation was from Fiona Joyce.
Fiona shared her experiences of 2 recent job interviews, the second of which, and the one she really wanted, was a success. Fiona showed us some of the resources she used including a Quiz Quiz Trade activity and she also used what she called "hot chili" questions. The more difficult these questions are the hotter the chilli icon was on the white board.
The second presentation came from Claire Humphrey. Claire showed us how she has used Minecraft-style activities as a way to improve the reading and writing skills of her students. She used colouring grids and mini whiteboards as a way to get the students to write longer sentences in the target language.
Next came Diana Keszler.Diana showed us a number of amazing resources she uses with her groups.
Among these were her kitten picture starter activities where students have to say a sentence in the target language about one of the pictures on the screen. She also showed us "secret spy"; a card for students to fill in about the progress of one of their classmates, code cracking activities, talking pegs, extension cards, and her own version of tarsia puzzles* which "are easier to cut up".
Martin Heeley gave the next presentation where he demonstrated match up cards. These are cards with a question and the answer to a different question on. One student reads the question on their card and the person with the answer shouts it out and then reads their question, and so on. I like this a lot.
Next Annabel Forster showed us how to fake realia. She showed us how to fake emails and texts. This is easier to do if you have a German/French speaking friend who is willing to send you pretend texts in the target language. This reminded me of the Fakebook, SMS Generator and Twister from classtools.net.
Will Bowden then told us about his experiences of teaching students, who don't know how to tell the time, how to tell the time. He devised some numeracy activities to help the students overcome this, including using a pizza graphic to explain quarter past and quarter to. Will also told us about his "ipad v dictionary" competitions he has with his pupils looking up new vocabulary.
Next, primary specialist, Vikki Bruff, showed us how her pupils formed "human sentences". They have hi-viz vests and are given laminated words to attach to them, they them stand in a line to form a sentence in the target language.
Vanessa Burns then showed us some of the ways she gives feedback to her students. She quoted Dylan Wiliam "feedback versus feed forward" and shared her codes she uses to save a lot of time. Vanessa also told us about how her students feedback in a different colour and also how they peer assess.
Terri Dunne was next. She showed us how she gives recorded, spoken feedback to her students. Terri explained that it's quicker to record and send feedback to students than to write it and also her students like to guess where she was when she recorded it by the sounds in the background.
Following on from this, Joe Dale, demonstrated the Opinion Podcasts app which can be useful for setting speaking tasks for students which can then be saved, converted to mp3 using RP7 and stored in a shared cloud for assessing and feedback.
Alex Bellars shared an activity he had learned the previous weekend at #edcamp15, a photo scavenger hunt. I love this idea of students searching for clues in the target language.
The penultimate presentation of the morning session was from Samantha Paulin. She showed us how she uses crib sheets with phrases target language phrases to get the students to speak. She does this as a competition so each time a student uses one of the phrases they achieve points. My students have something similar pasted into their books but I've never made it a competitive thing. Perhaps I should.
The final presentation of the morning session was my 5 minutes on Time Management. It seemed to go down quite well. I've blogged about it here.
After lunch we had the first of 2 keynotes. This was from Steven Fawkes from ALL.
He talked to us about joining ALL and about the different types of CPD it offers.
Steven shared 2 websites with us: firstly, https://allconnectblog.wordpress.com/ which contains links on grammar and translation for teachers of KS2 and KS3 and secondly this site, http://all-literature.wikidot.com/ which contains information and texts to help teach literature.
For the final part of his speech, Steven presented some hilarious mis-translations into English from some old exam papers.
The next part of the afternoon was sessions from Erasmus+ and Vocab Express, two of the day's sponsors.
Then there were 3 sessions presented by Joe Dale, Alex Bellars and me.
Joe demonstrated how to use Book Creator App, Alex gave a presentation about Classdojo, and I did an updated, much shorter and less creme-eggier version of my #ililc5 session, Teaching my dog to whistle.
The day finished with a presentation form the highly entertaining Chris Henley from Art of Brilliance.
He shared some hilarious anecdotes with us and pretty much convinced us all we were brilliant.
