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!