How to Introduce Gendered Nouns in KS3 French

As well as teaching, and cobbling together this nonsense, I often do other things.

One thing I do is write funny things for satirical websites and occasionally the radio.

Another thing I do, once every Preston Guild, is write articles about teaching languages.

Here is my latest offering on Teachwire, the snappily named: How to Introduce Gendered Nouns in KS3 French.

Enjoy.

Learning and retaining vocabulary...

My Year 7 students have just had exams.

The majority have done well and their hard work has paid off.

They scored fewer marks in their writing papers, though.

Their spelling really let them down

So, this is my plan to improve spelling and vocabulary retention:

When setting vocabulary learning homework make them write it out a number of times and then hand in proof that they have done it. 

I've just started to do this so there's no proof it has improved their work yet. 

Watch this space though, I'm sure that their test results and retention are going to get better...

Curiosity...

Proverbialists and fans of mid-80s pop music would have you believe that Curiosity Killed The Cat. 



NASA would prefer you to believe that Curiosity is currently exploring the Gale Crater on the planet Mars. 


Or is it? 

Yes, it is. 

Look:


Curiosity is also the title of a programme at my school in which students are given the opportunity to work with teachers and guests to find out more about the subjects they study and how they can be linked to real life. 

Curious students tend to do better than their less curious classmates. 

A few weeks ago I planned and delivered a Curiosity session (based on an article I wrote for Teach Secondary about gender and adjectives in French).

My session started with me asking the students a question: 

Why is a French pencil case feminine and a Spanish pencil case masculine? 

The inevitable answer came: 

          You told us they were. 




The truth is that students, generally speaking, just accept everything their teachers tell them as Gospel and rarely question anything. 

To my mind, Curiosity sessions are the ideal place to question anything and everything. 

In a controlled environment, obviously. 

I'm not a hippy!

So, I set the young explorers away on a (laptop) mission to discover why some words are masculine and feminine and even neuter! 

The important things they discovered were:

• Most Latin-based languages have different genders of nouns and some others but not all.

• "gender" has nothing to do with sex and is closely linked to the word "genre"

• physical characteristics often dictate the gender of a noun

• Abstract nouns tend to be feminine in many languages (they tested it on wordreference.com) 

• Sometimes the same word can have 2 different genders depending on its meaning.

• Nobody really knows why.  

• and my favourite, it is important to ask questions and research answers even though there is not always a clear answer.

They really enjoyed themselves and I'd love to do it again. 

Silent corridors

Silent Corridors, no, not the 1974 Italian horror film or the late '80s Manchester Indie band of the same name*, but the latest great/terrible idea from Senior Leaders (Twitter almost exploded because of this) to keep students calm during the change-over time between classes.

The school in question (and it isn't the only one with this policy) has been described in the British media as "concentration camp-like" and "a North Korean gulag" a full week before the policy will even be introduced.

Some schools have been doing it for years and their students accept it.

And are all amazingly well behaved!

Mostly.

I imagine.

I'm not a fan of silent corridors but I can understanding the reasoning behind them.

I get that in schools where there are discipline issues, they might be a good idea.

During exam season, they can be a huge help to students, particularly when lesson change-overs and break times might not follow public exam timetables.

If a school has problems with behaviour between lessons, might I suggest that a greater SLT presence would be a better policy?

My problem with silent corridors is that it stops children discussing their learning. I am convinced that a lot of learning and a lot of explaining goes on in corridors on the way to lessons.

I've seen it going on and it would be a terrible shame to lose it...


*I made both of these up

PS: Since I wrote this blog, there has been even more speculation on social media.
I spotted this on Twitter:

I'm not sure how the 10% raise in achievement happened but as soon as I find out and read the data, I'll add it.

I need the toilet!

 Here's a fact for you:

Children, like adults, sometimes need to go to the toilet.

Unlike teachers, who can avoid using the toilet for days at a time, normal people sometimes get caught short.

How can you tell if someone genuinely does need the toilet? 

Simple answer: you can't. 

Rather like burnt toast, the smell only permeates the room after the fact. 

There are lots of reasons why they might need to go, too!

Here is a list of things teachers have said to students who have asked to avail themselves of the facilities during class:

• No.

• You should have gone at break-time/lunchtime. 

• I'm not surprised; you've just drunk a litre of water/Red Bull/Irn Bru/coffee/Smoothie/etc, etc...

• Can't you wait?

• Not again. 

...and I've even heard colleagues humiliate students about their toilet habits... 

This is my solution. I've been doing this for a year or so, now.

At my school, students are only allowed out of lessons if they are in possession of the teacher's "yellow card". Any child wandering the corridors not carrying the card will be stopped and challenged.

My yellow card is stuck on the wall near the door.

If a child needs the toilet, they don't need to ask. They get up, take the card, go to the toilet, come back, put the card back on the wall, and return to their seat.

Occasionally, a child will take advantage of the system.

If I suspect this I put a note in their book with the time they left and then I'll write the time they came back.

It's all about trust. 

So far, so good. 

J'attendrai le suivant - lesson idea for exploiting a short film

This was the lesson I did this morning with Year 12.

I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary.

It's the end of term, after all.

The first thing we did was watch the short film, J'attendrai le suivant.



If you'd prefer a subtitled version, there are two on youtube here:
English  subtitles
French subtitles

Then I gave the students a copy of the script and we did a series of exercises to exploit the text.

We've been doing a lot of grammar revision recently, so the first task was to identify verb tenses and highlight them in different colours. There are some good examples of past, present, future, the odd conditional, and even a nice, juicy subjunctive!

Then we did some translation from French to English, paying particular attention to some lovely phrases, like pour se faire poser des lapins

Next we did some translation from English into French (looking at tenses again).

Then we watched the film a second time, creating a timeline of emotions which the woman experiences.
A good excuse to revise adjective agreement.

The penultimate task was to write a short paragraph about how the woman might be feeling, using time phrases and the phrases we've learned to structure an essay.

The final task was for the students to give their opinions about the film and how it made them feel.
To do this, they used the kinds of phrases they've been using to describe the characters in the Maupassant short stories we've studied this year and it also acts as a nice introduction to the film (Les 400 Coups) they'll be studying in Year 13.

Not bad for an hour's work...

Poetry - teaching yourself the past tense.

A while ago, I was asked to plan and deliver an after school French session for some Year 7AGT (Able, Gifted, and Talented) students.

The brief was to get them to do something they wouldn't do in class and something which would be really challenging. 

I had an hour.

I decided to do some poetry. 

Specifically, Jacques Prevert's Déjeuner Du Matin.

So what did I do? 

The first task I gave them was a Tarsia puzzle of the poem. (See Clare Seccombe's Tarsia blogpost here.)

The students had to put the puzzle together. (They had never met the passé composé before.)

The second task was to  explain how to form the passé composé in French.

They had to produce a list of rules. (They did this quite well.)

The third task was "to build" the poem.

The students had never met this poem before. 

They were given the lines of the poem on strips of paper and they had to organise them in the order they thought the lines would appear in the poem.

They then watched Stuart Gorse's Hugo clip to see how close they were:

The final task was to try to work out when the poem was written and what it was about.

They worked really hard and enjoyed themselves.

What more could you want?

Are the poorest students really missing out on languages?

I've just read an article on the BBC website:

Language lesson gap means poorest miss out, says report.

It has made me quite sad and a little angry.

(Oh no, not a ranty post, Dom. Yeah. Sorry.)

In my experience, the reason students are "missing out" is because many schools are looking  for "good results" rather than taking into consideration the motivation, preferences, needs or abilities of their students.

I've lost count of the number of students who have loved learning a language in KS3 only to be told that they can't (or shouldn't) do it at GCSE because...

• it's too hard*
• you won't enjoy it, it gets much harder next year*
• you've got a better chance of getting a 4 in (another subject)*
• you won't like the teacher*

* delete as applicable

Our students aren't missing out; we are doing them a huge disservice.

Live Tweeting Boule de Suif

I'm currently studying Maupassant's Contes de Guerre with my Y12 Advanced Level class.

Tomorrow, we are going to imagine that the characters in Boule de Suif have a smart phone and are "live tweeting" their experiences. 

The students can write a maximum of 14 tweets (it's all I could fit on the paper) and are limited to 140 characters per tweet.

Yes, I know twitter now allows 280 characters but only Donald Trump writes tweets this long.

They have to convey the character's experiences and feelings whilst including the key moments from the story.

I made this worksheet for them to fill in as, sadly, all social media sites are blocked at school. 

Also, I'm not sure it's a good thing for a 17 year old student to be masquerading as a  French prostitute on social media outlets.

Even one from the 19th century.

Because of the 140 characters limit I have imposed, the students will have access to talkinfrench.com's French text slang page... 

...because that's what people in 19th century Rouen did. I imagine!

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.